Imagination einer Frau - Christel Runne (1894 - 1981)

In the organizer's words:

The rediscovery of an artist

When the Mülheim gallery owner Gerold d'Hamé found the artistic estate of the Witten-born Münster painter Christel Runne, she was a largely unknown and forgotten artist even in her home town. It was only with the help of her photo albums, a notebook and the analysis of almost 400 letters from the period 1910 to 1935, which were found in her non-artistic estate, that we were able to reconstruct fragments of her biography, so that the life and work of Christel Runne are now accessible to the public again in our exhibition.

Christel Runne attended the Düsseldorf School of Arts and Crafts from 1916 to 1919 and then settled in Münster. In the 1920s, she was very present at numerous exhibitions, particularly in Westphalia. In St. Gallen in Switzerland, where her then fiancé Dr. Wulf Oeler supported her exhibition activities, she achieved very good sales successes. Christel Runne, who had developed her own artistic style in the 1920s and worked on subjects that were rather unusual for women painters at the time, increasingly turned away from artistic painting in the mid-1930s after the birth of her two children.

In our exhibition, we are showing works from the 1920s and 1930s that Gerold d'Hamé made available to us; Galerie d'Hame is also showing a further group of works in Mülheim. In addition, the Münster City Museum is presenting some early paintings from the estate in a group exhibition with local artists, so that Christel Runne is now back on the scene in three cities in the truest sense of the word.

A stylistically versatile painter and draughtswoman is to be rediscovered, who is honored for the first time in our extensive catalog.

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