Elke
Reis

German artist Elke Reis has been connected to art throughout her life. As a child she was stunned by the drawings of her father. Growing up in a poor family under miserablecircumstances during the last years of World War II he couldn’t even consider pursuing anart career. But his love and talent for drawing influenced the artist’s life more than shewould have thought.For a long time Elke was busy with her family and enjoyed her job as a teacher. Still, herdeep passion for art never diminished. The move to Northern California proved to be awelcome opportunity to reawaken this love.“I felt like walking on a new path, doing a few steps not knowing where it will lead me. I’vediscovered my old love and I nourish it now with all my heart. I realized what I’ve missed for solong – focusing on figure, shape and color, approaching and sculpting the essence of thehuman being.”Meandering from figurative expressionism to pure formalism her work became more andmore abstract and reduced. In her paintings Elke explores various nuances of the colorblack through different mediums and materials. With the nearly monochrome black canvasshe opens up the confined space of the canvas and seeks to go beyond its limits, to createpoetic images where the viewer can deeply immerse himself into the black pictorial space.However, her nonobjective compositions are not just about color, lines and forms, for theartist even the most abstract work is all about human consciousness, emotion andsensuality. Elke Reis follows the footsteps set by the Abstract Expressionists like Rothko orNewman and refers to the words of Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky as hermanifesto: “Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see withhis eyes … Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infiniteout of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.”Elke moved back to Germany several years ago and started running a non-profit galleryspace in Munich. Around the same time she resumed her teaching job, now trained in arttherapy.She took the first step exhibiting her art in California. Since then her work has been shownlocally and internationally and is represented in several private collections throughoutEurope and the US.