Rissa (artist)

Rissa (born Karin Martin, June 22, 1938 in near Chemnitz), is a German artist and former professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In 1964 she adopted the artist name Rissa, derived from the Norwegian municipality, Rissa.

In 1953 Karin Martin emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany with her parents from the German Democratic Republic. From 1960 to 1965 she studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Götz, her classmates being HA Schult, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and other important German artists. In 1965 she married her professor. From 1969 to 2003, Rissa taught art at the Düsseldorf academy, first as a lecturer, then as a professor.

From the early 1960s and in the 70s, she worked closely with her professor and husband Götz. In 1972, they published a book entitled, Probleme der Bildästhetik – Eine Einführung in die Grundlagen des anschaulichen Denkens.

In 1977 she co-founded, with Astrid Feuser, Bernd Finkeldei, Udo Scheel and Norbert Tadeusz, the group Axiom. In 1997, she founded, with her husband, the K.O.Götz und Rissa-Stiftung.

Rissa's representational painting is characterized by stylistic reduction and the emphasis on volume and form. From the mid-1960s, she developed a style that did not achieve volume through color transitions and light-dark gradations. Forms are divided into individual color areas, which are placed next to each other and only when viewed from a distance give a spatial effect as well as a higher degree of abstraction. References to Informalism are produced by brush strokes that break through individual color areas.

Rissa's themes are sexuality and eroticism, emancipation, environmental threats and the animal world. At the beginning of the 1990s her work also changed to topics such as the Gulf War and Islam. For example, the artist painted veiled Bedouin men and women ('Wüstensohn', 1991; 'Wüstentochter', 1993). However, these works should not be confused with paintings by the Nigerian painter, Rissa Ixa. The painting Am Golf (At the Gulf, 1991), shows a fish jumping out of the oil-laden, burning sea.

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