The painter and printmaker Christa Dichgans was born in Berlin in 1940. From 1960 to 1965 she studied at Berlin’s major art school, the Hochschule der Künste, under Fred Thieler. A scholarship allowed her to visit New York in 1966. A year later she settled in Rome, and in the late 1960s, influenced by Pop Art and Photorealism, she began painting small-format pictures of banal everyday objects and children’s toys. Around 1975 the motifs took a menacing turn, with symbols of violence and doll-like dead bodies. In the 1980s she worked as an assistant to the well-known German painter Georg Baselitz. Her works have been presented internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions. In Europe she has become known as a pioneer of Pop Art with shows like POWER UP – Female Pop Art in the Kunsthalle Wien in 2010/2011 and German Pop at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2014. Since 1972 the artist has lived and worked in Berlin and La Haute Carpénée in the south of France. She died in Berlin in 2018.
