Runhild Röder: In defence of Beauty
Painting, presence and becoming
Runhild Röder places Beauty at the centre of her artistic and philosophical inquiry. Her position is consciously resistant: against what she describes as the “exile of Beauty” from modern art, she asserts its continuing capacity to reveal something fundamental about human experience. Beauty, for Röder, is neither ornament nor escape. Rooted in a metaphysical understanding of Truth and Goodness, it becomes a means of reaching beyond appearances.
This search unfolds through an intensely personal visual language. Bodies stretch beyond anatomical convention; primary colours become autonomous forces; lines move between description and gesture. The figure remains recognizable but never fixed. It exists in a state of transformation, what Röder describes as “becoming.”
Her approach is also deeply informed by hermeneutics. Röder does not expect an artwork to deliver a single, closed meaning. “My artworks say it better for me,” she writes, acknowledging the limits of language. Titles offer the viewer a clue rather than an explanation, leaving meaning to emerge through the encounter between artwork and observer.
Underlying these works is ultimately an affirmative proposition. Röder does not deny fragmentation, darkness or uncertainty; she refuses to grant them the final word. Painting becomes instead a space in which presence, beauty and transformation remain possible.
The body as a place of transformation
The works presented here reveal a figurative dimension of Röder's practice in which the body functions simultaneously as subject, structure and expressive force. Her figures do not conform to anatomical realism. Limbs become lines; torsos expand into fields of colour; bodies encounter geometric and architectural forms. At times, the figure seems almost to dissolve into the gestures from which it has been constructed. Her recurring use of primary colours belongs to this search for an elemental visual language: colour functions not merely as description, but as structure, energy and affirmation.
This transformation of the body allows Röder to move beyond description toward a more interior conception of human presence.
The female figure assumes particular importance. Rather than presenting women as passive bodies offered to the viewer's gaze, Röder gives them a strong physical and pictorial presence. They stretch, confront, occupy and sometimes disrupt the space around them.
I am (2012) and Yellow Mistake (2009)
Colour, line and gesture
Colour in Röder's work possesses an autonomy of its own. Intense reds, yellows and blacks frequently dominate the composition, surrounded by expanses of white. These colours do not simply describe flesh, clothing or environment. They operate as forces within the painting. Her recurring use of primary colours belongs to this search for an elemental visual language: colour functions not merely as description, but as structure, energy and affirmation.
The line behaves similarly. Sometimes it defines a body; elsewhere it escapes anatomy altogether and becomes an independent gesture. The distinction between figure and abstraction consequently remains fluid.
A body can become a line.
A line can become movement.
Movement can become presence.
This instability is central to Röder's visual language.
The “Magical NOW”
Röder describes her creative experience through an intensely personal vocabulary. She speaks of the “Magical NOW,” the “Quantum Leap,” transcendence, immanence, beauty, goodness and becoming.
Read literally, these expressions can appear cosmological or spiritual. Within the context of her painting, however, they reveal something quite specific about how she understands creation.
For Röder, painting happens in an irreducible present.
The artwork is not simply the product of a predetermined idea. It emerges through the encounter between intuition, gesture, colour and material at a particular moment. This is why she describes each work as possessing an “unrepeatable Beauty.”
Lines overlap, proportions shift and colour sometimes escapes its boundaries. Rather than concealing these traces of execution beneath a polished surface, Röder allows them to preserve the immediacy of making. The painting carries within it the memory of the moment in which it came into existence.
Shashi the Theologian, 2011
From the body toward abstraction
The paintings presented here also reveal a movement that becomes important when Röder's figurative and abstract works are considered together. The body provides an initial structure, but gesture increasingly acquires independence from it. The figure becomes simplified.
Anatomy becomes line.
Line becomes sign.
Sign approaches abstraction.
In Röder's more radically abstract works, the body may disappear almost completely. Circles, sweeping black marks, blocks of colour and isolated gestures remain. Yet something persists across both bodies of work: the belief that painting is capable of making an interior experience materially present.
The transition from figure to abstraction can therefore be understood not as a rejection of the body but as a progressive liberation of the gesture that was already contained within it.
An art of becoming
Runhild Röder's paintings occupy an unstable territory between body and sign, intuition and structure, material presence and metaphysical aspiration. She has developed a highly personal visual and philosophical language.
Her contemporary artistic statement, with its references to the Magical NOW, transcendence, Gaia and continual transformation can be understood as her attempt to articulate something that painting had revealed to her much earlier: creation as an encounter with possibilities not yet fully known.
The works presented here capture different moments within that search. The figure remains present but never fixed. Bodies transform into lines; lines become gestures; gestures open toward abstraction. For Röder, the artwork is therefore neither simply an image nor an illustration of an idea. It is an event of transformation.
The body is a point of departure.
Gesture becomes its language.
Becoming is its horizon.