Carolin Wehrmann

Carolin Wehrmann is considered one of the world’s leading contemporary painters of seascapes and aquatic scenes. Born in 1959 in the Rhineland, she painted in oils for the first time at the age of 12. On graduating from Düsseldorf’s Goethe Gymnasium she first studied law in Cologne, only to take up her true calling three years on when she changed to study graphic arts in Düsseldorf under Professor Kurt Wolff.

Her current glazing technique is the result, moreover, of profound knowledge of the use of pigments, oils and resins. By employing glazing she achieves this fascinating effect of depth in her latest variation of contemporary realism. The intricate nuancing of light and colour is what conveys to the observer the sheer exuberance of a world full of life and beauty, a pervading sense of atmosphere and infinite complexity.

For Carolin Wehrmann, the sea is an expression of her own quest for an ideal world and, transcendentally, of her longing to depict pristine, unspoiled nature. In her water pictures she expresses the primeval desire to represent clarity and purity. Her works reveal her own search for greater meaning in the subjects she approaches. At the same time, the artist wants to open the viewer’s eyes to the beauty and perfection of creation.

Classics and Reflections - a dialogue: The artist has developed the genre of seascapes and the subject of water in an extraordinarily consistent and intense way. While until several years ago her works were predominantly traditional, masterfully painted compositions of sky, horizon, water and shore - in the "Reflections" series she succeeds in significantly redefining the water motif. She breaks through the conventional boundaries between genres and in so doing creates her own, highly personal expression. In the overall context of the artist’s complete works, "Reflections" are not a shift in the artist’s expression to which she has devoted herself to the exclusion of all else; rather, both the "classic" mode and the "Reflections" approach have their own, equally valid place in her work. They complement each other, they explain each other, they develop greater meaning through the dialogue they establish together. In "Reflections" , a sample from nature is extracted from the whole and frees itself from time and space to become something approaching allegory, a symbol of timelessness. The viewer is led away from the here and now into a realm of deeper meaning and thus beyond the bounds of the painting. In this encounter we meet a pure, clear, unspoiled, primeval version of nature and, at the same time, a utopian ideal of the future. Thus the moving water in "Reflections" also stands symbolically for a sensory world of thinking and feeling in constant change and so introduces us to the modern philosophical understanding of art and the world. Moreover "Reflections" also open our eyes to the transcendent, spiritual world. We see heaven in the water, a flash of light as a premonition and all dimensions of existence in one: the seabed, the land, hence the earthly planet, above it the water as a sign of mutability and all that is living. In the water appears that which outshines everything terrestrial: the heavens and the sun as a metaphor for the other-worldly, the transcendental.

Hence Carolin Wehrmann’s "Reflections" convey all dimensions of existence concurrently and links them to a utopian vision of a world of clarity, purity and candour. In every sense, Carolin Wehrmann’s "Reflections" are to be seen as part of meaningful contemporary art. Given both her high degree of artistic skill and the depth of meaning and multi-layered nature of her message, in her latest series of paintings Carolin Wehrmann achieves the ultimate in art.

Carolin Wehrmann had her first breakthrough far from her native Düsseldorf with exhibitions in the USA such as in Naples (Fl.), Newport (RI), Key Largo (Fl.), Boca Raton (Fl.) and, in 2008, in Beverly Hills as well as in Dubai and Paris.

Today the artist’s works can be seen at selected galleries across the world where she is represented on a permanent basis with regular solo-exhibitions. Her works are to be found in significant public and private collections.