# Luisa Richter

Luisa Richter (June 30, 1928 – October 29, 2015) born Louise Kaelble, was a Venezuelan-based graphic artist and professor originally from Germany. She was born in Besigheim, Germany and died in Caracas, Venezuela. Her art was heavily influenced by post-war movements and Bauhaus. She later moved to Venezuela in 1955 where she spent the rest of her life, became a professor at the Neumann Institute in Caracas, and founded the Prodiseño graphic design school.

## Early life

Born in Besigheim, Germany in 1928, Louise Kaelble was the daughter of engineer and architect Albert Kaelble and Gertrud Unkel. In 1946 she studied at the März en Stuttgart Academy in Germany and started her career as an artist at The Independent School of Art in Stuttgart. Between 1949 and 1955 she studied under the guidance of her master Willi Baumeister at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. During this period, she started working on illustrations for the magazines Stuttgarter Leben and Die Welt der Frau, and the editorials Egon Schuler and Bechtle Verlag. After this, she moved away and lived in between Paris and Rome. Between 1950 and 1953, Richter studied existentialism from Max Bense at the Technical University of Stuttgart. In September 1955, she married Hans Joachim Richter, and in December both decided to move to Caracas, Venezuela, because of her husband's profession.

## Career

In 1958, Richter became part of national salons exhibiting four monotypes at the 19th official Salon in Venezuela. At the 20th official Salon in Venezuela she exhibited three oils: Event, Transparent, and Soft Modulation. In 1959, she hosted her own individual exhibit at the MBA where works like Hieroglyph and Gilgamesh were shown. The next year, she joined the collection called “Living Spaces” hosted at the Municipal Castle of Maracaibo and also joined the Experimental Salon at Sala Mendoza. It was a mixture of plastic post-war tendencies that focused their main interests in reflecting about matter and gesture. With this in mind, Ricardo Pau-Llosa said "Richter took the refined visual lexicon of Informalism and directed it toward other ends; Transformed it into the instrument with which to reflect on one of the most complex acts of consciousness-thinking visually".
Since then, Richter started doing Cortes de Tierra (1958-1963), that are pieces close to monochrome palettes, rich textures, and conscious bidimensionality. Around 1961, she started a series of drawings called Crosses and Connections that extend the expressionist school seen from a Tachist and gestural point of view. She also started working on lithographs in Stuttgart, Germany, along with Erich Mönch. In 1963, she returned to figurative painting and produced artwork like Triptych (oil on canvas, 1963), where the human figure is in a constant struggle with abstractism. References of mythology and existential literature were frequent in the production of her work and during these years, and Richter started working at Luisa Palacio's engraving workshop. In 1964, she explored the collage technique. Besides oils, Luisa Richter produced a series of work done with gouache Reflejos (1973-1989) and pastels Andamios Suspendidos (1978-1988); oftentimes her work was mixed media such as in Crucifixión (collage & gouache, 1981) or Tejido sideral (oils & collage, 1983). In 1966, she joined the exhibit “Emergent Decade" at the Guggenheim Museum, where one of the largest shows of Latin American art was being held that decade. Her reflections on plane and two-dimensionality, plastic elements, and representative icons have made her work "a theater of visual thought" (Pau-Llosa, 1991, s.p.)
In 1967, Richter was warded the National Prize of Drawing and Engraving by Rhoni K. in Venezuela. In 1968, she started a series of landscapes named Espacios Planos, and in 1972, she also started a series of portraits based on expressionist tradition “Blanca de Gerlach” (Gan Collection). From 1969 until 1987, she taught classes as an analytical and compositional drawing at the Neumann Institute, one of the first graphic designs schools in Venezuela. In 1978, she represented Venezuela at the XXXVIII Bienal de Venecia, where she showed 12 oil paintings, her series “Espacios Planos”, and 60 different collages and texts related to art and existentialism.
As an artist, Juan Calzadilla wrote: "investigative, yet at the same time she manifests in her entire work a strange, obsessive loyalty to an authentic and sincere language." Under the influence of her tutor Willi Baumeister, she carried out abstraction in works characterized by the use of lumpy textures and atmospheric suggestion; the subject of cuts and division of the Venezuelan land. After 1963, and through graphic means, she tried to express in her art a different type of symbols with the use of impulsive strokes and lines, and paintings that would lead later, from 1966 to 1969, to an intermezzo of figurative, and from then until 1977, are occasionally created portraits that she treated as rehearsals or tryouts.

## Legacy

While in Venezuela, Richter founded Prodiseño, one of the largest graphic design schools in the country. She was also a part-time professor at the Neumann Art Institute in Caracas, Venezuela, where she taught technical drawing and analytical drawing. Richter died at the age 87.
Richter received many awards and recognitions, including the prestigious 1982 National Prize of Plastic Arts in Caracas.