Eva Roemer
Artist of masterful color woodcuts

28 March to 31 August 2025 

The painter and draughtswoman Eva Roemer was born in Berlin in 1889 and lived on Lake Starnberg from the 1920s onwards. The water and the mountains, the wind and the light characterised her work. Nature is always at the centre of her pictures. Reeds bend in the storm, the lake shines in the evening light, a spring cloud rises in front of the distant mountains. In fine lines and light colours, Roemer portrayed a world in balance between change and permanence. She left behind a broad oeuvre in which the colour woodcuts occupy the most important place. In the pictorial language of her woodcuts, Roemer follows a visible enthusiasm for Japanese art, which at the beginning of the 20th century was also embraced by modern avant-gardes. 

In contrast to Roemer's balanced compositions, her life was characterised by upheavals. She came from the Mendelssohn family. The composer Fanny Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's sister, was Roemer's great-grandmother. She was orphaned as a small child and grew up with her grandparents and later with her aunt. As a woman, she was denied access to art academies, which is why she received private lessons from renowned painters. In the late 1920s, she moved to Lake Starnberg to live with her great-cousin Martha Mendelssohn Bartholdy. The two women survived the Nazi era in seclusion in their own house in Kempfenhausen on Lake Starnberg. Eva Roemer died in 1977, and her work is being presented comprehensively for the first time in the exhibition at the Museum Starnberger See.

special thanks to
Dr. Monika Demmler-Siebenwirth, Doris Fuchsberger, Sabeeka Gangjee-Well, Armgard Heidegert Hoesch, Elke Link, Holger Paul, Heinz Rothenfußer, Wulf Schmid-Noerr und Dr. Felix Winter