For the first time, a comprehensive retrospective is showcasing large parts of the works of Marburg artist Katharina N. Eitel, who passed away ten years ago at the age of 70. In several rooms, the Kunstmuseum Marburg is presenting an overview of her diverse œuvre with well over a hundred exhibits.
The exhibited works will be available for purchase after the exhibition, with all proceeds going to the foundation.
sehen • innehalten • werden
(observe • reflect • become)
KATHARINA NATALIE EITEL
27 April – 16 June 2026
Kunstmuseum Marburg
During her more than forty years as an artist, Katharina Natalie Eitel gained public recognition with her highly acclaimed large-scale paper installations from the ‘zeithaut’ series in museums, a church and other exhibition venues, but she rarely exhibited individual paintings or drawings, her objects and experimental paper art. The examination of her estate brought to light a seemingly inexhaustible wealth of works, which will be on display.
Visitors will be able to see a selection of her costumes created in London, large-format sketchbooks, handmade papers with drawings and paintings, paper artworks, marbled pictures, photographs and the results of her artistic exploration of central themes such as dialogue, vessels, landscape, the past and the body.
As an example of her room installations, the “sternenzelt” (‘star tent’), made of many handmade papers with different coloured marbled stars, will be rebuilt for the exhibition. Katharina N. Eitel created and exhibited it in Marburg in 1996 under the title ‘1001 Stars for Jerusalem – The Sky Above Jerusalem is Indivisible’ and presented a variation at the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach am Main in 2002.
Videos of eight room installations will be shown on a video terminal, including ‘Dialogue with Else Lasker-Schüler’ from 1995 at the mak in Frankfurt am Main.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a 240-page publication from Sandstein Kultur Verlag, whose bookbinding and choice of materials pay tribute to the artist’s love of paper. A small portion of the print run will take on the character of an edition with the addition of original works.
During the exhibition, there will be a workshop in which members of Papierwerk Glockenbach/Munich will teach the art of paper making.
The artistic estate of Katharina N. Eitel is owned by the non-profit and charitable foundation HOFFNUNG13, which she established and which has co-financed over 18 major international projects since 2017, offering musical activities to children and young people in war and crisis zones in order to to help them overcome their traumas.
Comments about Katharina Natalie Eitel
‘Katharina Natalie Eitel’s great enthusiasm for experimentation has many surprises in store for the audience. Images, words and symbols on paper and made of paper characterise the work of a highly sensitive artistic personality, which, in addition to a firework display of colours, focuses on basic forms and reduced colour accents.’
Dr. Christoph Otterbeck, Director, Kunstmuseum Marburg
‘In the course of her artistic life, KNE has developed a very special expertise in working with paper. She has applied her feel for the material, combined with her ability to draw on the depths of her inner imagination to enable multi-layered perceptions, in her work “Zeithaut” (Time Skin) over a longer period of time in various stages.’
Dr Sabine Runde, Senior Curator, mak Frankfurt/M.
“An artist who – in this respect she is structurally comparable to Else Lasker-Schüler – needs and moves the word, the words to be painted, as the starting point for her creative use of paper (predominantly without words)… She perceives and creates a space between the front and back of a piece of paper, which thrives on word formations. And these “relieve” what the paper has to convey without words… Her papers are like identity documents of her humane, yet disarmingly unemotional attitude. Art was her craft, which permeated her entire life, a comprehensive dialogue in a matrix more complex than that which relies solely on concepts. Writing with, in and on paper is her medium.”
Dr. Stefan Soltek, Director, Klingspor Museum Offenbach/M.