Suse Kohler stands on the terrace in front of her studio and points to Tegernsee’s local mountains, which spread out before her like a postcard: the Wallberg, the Hirschberg, the Neureuth. She calls them places of power – together with the lake, the clear air, the evening mood when the horizon quietly turns dark pink. “The most beautiful thing,” she says, “is being here in my studio.”

The studio is spread throughout a small house that could have sprung from the film set of an Eberhofer crime comedy. One half expects Ilse Neubauer to step out in her apron dress. Were it not for the tables full of brushes, squeezed-out paint tubes, palettes – and paintings that inhabit this crooked little house like colourful counterpoints, spreading from the small hallway up the steep, winding staircase into the former bedroom and the chamber.

“I’m going over to Frau Schlicker’s,” is therefore Suse’s familiar phrase when she comes over from her house opposite to paint. Many years ago, Frau Schlicker was the good soul of the neighbourhood and, for Suse’s four children, something like a third grandmother. As art entered Suse Kohler’s life more and more, she decided to exchange her first studio for Frau Schlicker’s former house and to leave it as it was, in her memory.

“I have always painted,” she says. At school – Suse Kohler grew up in Oberammergau – she took over the art-class paintings for half the class. It was clear early on that she wanted to study art after graduating from school. But her father, a dentist, advised her: “Better do something sensible.” So it became marketing and communications. After her studies, she chose the film and advertising industry: “A cool time. I produced commercials at Filmhaus Munich, always flying after the sun – and even then, for me, it was about storytelling.”

Suse Kohler married the Tegernsee hotelier Korbinian Kohler and had four children. Quite consciously, she decided to accompany them as they grew up. “When Quirin, our youngest, was old enough, my time had come. I wanted to build something of my own.” The urgent wish to finally learn painting from the ground up began to take shape.

Werner Maier, a Munich painter and friend, taught Suse Kohler intensively for over a year. Afterwards, she felt ready to study with Markus Lüpertz at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kolbermoor – and, with her portfolio, gained one of the 15 coveted places. Looking back, she says: “It was three years of struggle – because Lüpertz stands for free painting, and there I came along with my Tegernsee portraits full of joie de vivre.”

Between the individual teaching blocks, new paintings were created, with the master strictly discussing every brushstroke. Suse Kohler sensed a path that would not be easy: the concrete quality in her portraits would, in some way, have to approach dissolution – although this is precisely diametrically opposed to portrait painting.

At the end of her studies, inspired by a journey to Israel, Suse Kohler painted a series entitled “2019 Years of Suffering Endured”, devoted to the Passion of Christ. Expressive, authentic, with hardly any colour apart from the glowing red shroud.

“The image of Jesus earned me my accolade,” Suse Kohler recalls. “The portrait of Christ moved Lüpertz, and after that he gave me the go-ahead.” To this day, she says with a laugh, the famous German painter sits on her shoulder while she works: “I can almost hear him speaking to me during the painting process.”

Suse Kohler has remained faithful to portraits. First in her series “Seemänner”, in which she brings famous men whose lives were shaped by Tegernsee onto canvas: Franz Josef Strauß, Ludwig Thoma, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ludwig Erhard.

What connects them all, and what continues to run through her future series like a leitmotif, is the gaze of the protagonists – the eyes, with which she always begins to paint. As a mirror of the soul, which Suse Kohler wants to capture: “I want to grasp something that one cannot actually see.”

In 2018, her work “Ludwig Erhard” was exhibited for the first time at the summit of the same name at Lake Tegernsee. Since then, he has been its “figurehead”, and the artist designs the Freedom Prize of the Media every year.

“Traces of Power” was the title of the image series by the renowned German photographer Herlinde Koelbl, who portrayed personalities from politics and business in the 1990s. In 2021, Suse Kohler picked up the thread and presented Germany’s post-war chancellors in her series “Machtköpfe”. Here, too, the focus is on the eyes.

The protagonists, painted in acrylic, are rendered in black, white and grey – colours which, as she sees it, are reserved for men. The line here is very free, the application of paint rather dissolved. To the theme of power, which can certainly be interpreted in different ways, the artist wishes to lend a sense of lightness – the eyes are meant to ignite a dialogue with the viewer.

The exhibition opened at the end of October 2021 in the Lazy.Gallery of Munich photographer Simon Lohmeyer. It also included a second part, which Suse Kohler called “Behind”. As a homage to the anniversary “100 Years of Women at the Art Academy”, large-format oil paintings of Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel and Frida Kahlo were shown in the rear section.

Colourful, luminous, life-affirming and completely contrary to the “Machtköpfe” in the front area. Christian Wulff, whom Suse Kohler had also portrayed and who was present as a guest, spontaneously decided to take his drink in the rear section. Why? Through these images, the artist recounts, he had been made aware that it was men who had long denied women a stage. Besides, Wulff felt that women simply made life more colourful.

During an intensive painting session, which in the early years mostly took place at night, Suse Kohler listens to Mozart’s Requiem, the Oberammergau Passion – in which she herself took part as a little girl – or, depending on her mood, driving rock music. She says one can read it afterwards in her line.

At the moment, a new series is being created, which will be shown at the end of 2022. Suse Kohler is currently experimenting with surfaces, painting over, allowing fragments to come to the surface. Whether in this way she will approach a dissolution that could also be a detachment?

“In my work, the nose will certainly never have slipped seven centimetres to the left,” she says. “I could not do that to a face.” Suse Kohler’s theme, dissolution, is both curse and blessing at once. What remains is the intimate search for the human being behind the human being.

TATJANA SEEL