Klara Koitler was born in Worms, Germany but has lived and worked on the remote Greek Island of Ithaca for the last thirty years. She lives with her family in the ecological village of Sarakiniko where she gardens and looks after ancient olive trees - 'I harvest my own oil and enjoy the piece of earth we are living on, the silence, the timelessness, the sun and the gentle blue sea.' Essentially a self-taught painter with a highly personal vision, her paintings nonetheless combine a Germanic expressionism with a poetic interpretation of the Paris School led by Picasso. Her interest in the human figure has evolved over time and she now seeks to develop an 'abstract attitude' using stronger colours - experimenting with ever more unreal positions and contorted body shapes. Recently she has also started to juxtapose animals with the human form creating an exciting visual tension that has given an even greater expressive depth to her paintings.
'At times when the paintings of my women become difficult or boring or when I am not satisfied with the way they sit, the positioning of their arms or legs, their dressed or undressed bodies (it takes me weeks, months sometimes even years to finish one)……then , for a change, I start painting tables and chairs, small Greek scenes, to recover. Chairs even have a special field of variation and abstraction, but at least a chair remains a chair and it stays a more simple structure than a woman.'
Koilter's paintings have been exhibited widely since 1997 and her work has entered private collections throughout Europe.