The painting and sculpture of Karin Lambrecht embodies the gestural abstraction of her 1980s Brazilian generation. Using vibrant pigments, produced by the artist herself, she applies broad, gestural brushstrokes to hand-stitched, torn, and burned canvases, sometimes incorporating organic materials such as animal blood, charcoal, rainwater, and earth. Her recurring motifs include crosses and handwritten enigmatic words that emerge from layers of paint.

Lambrecht’s father was German and her mother, although born in Porto Alegre, went to a German school so Lambrecht grew up speaking German at home. In 1980, she went to Berlin in order to study at the Hochschule der Künste (HDK), now known as the Universität der Künste (UDK), where she was taught by artist, Raimunde Girke and saw lectures by Joseph Beuys. While Beuys’s influence may relate to her use of natural pigments and the multi-dimensionality of her work, it is was time spent in Girke’s studio that was particularly inspiring for Lambrecht. From Girke she learnt to enjoy the meditative process of painting, his studio was calm, and he imparted the idea that painting was a process akin to calligraphy.