Ida Büngener

1963 – 2024 Selected Works

Forthright and Vulnerable

The artist Ida Büngener (b. Lennestadt, 1943; lives and works in Düsseldorf) has been active in Düsseldorf since the early 1960s. Over the course of more than six decades, she has built an imposing oeuvre of paintings and drawings that has gone largely unnoticed by the art market and public audiences.

Büngener studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts from 1963 until 1967. Since her graduation, she has dedicated herself entirely to painting and drawing. Between 1963 and 2024, she produced a profound, sensitive, and forceful body of work comprising over 750 paintings and 700 drawings. Its defining themes include pregnancy, birth, care work, family, and friendship, as well as nature, loss, and death, a subject to which Büngener has charted a distinctive approach.

The extensive plate section, which makes this monograph the most comprehensive presentation to date of Büngener’s output between 1963 and 2024, is complemented by an essay by Nelly Gawellek that sheds light on the representation of family and parenthood in art. Elisa Tamaschke analyzes the interrelation between autobiographical experience and painterly expression, framing another perspective on Büngener’s multifaceted oeuvre.