Deliberated Lines. By Dorothea Baumer (Obituary on the artist in Süddeutsche Zeitung of Dec 22, 1998)

The artist Karl Bohrmann never seemed younger than in his last years. He had come radically close to his ideal of a good drawing. This fact must have astonished many who saw his exhibition in the Neue Pinakothek last fall. The works appeared “free and easy” and “as if they happened by themselves.” In hundreds of “repetitions” the artist conjured one thing alone: the mystery of appearance.
His works were not beautiful in a traditional sense. They suggested an incidental quality. The size was modest, the line plain and ragged, the changes minimal. From the pure motor activity of an up-and-down grew silhouetted memory-pictures of “trees,” or an endless series of lying, crouching and undressing “nudes” in ambiguously organized rooms. Without program or fashionable, pompous significance, something between seeing and reading occurred here: drawing. Karl Bohrmann’s art was always soft-spoken. This painter, draughtsman, and photographer went about his work inconspicuously, individualistically, and totally independently of the daily excitement of the “scene.” This is probably also the reason why he was not recognized for a long time by a broader public. In the sixties he still struggled just to survive. In 1980 the Lenbachhaus in Munich honoured the artist with a large retrospective of his paper works. The show drew attention to the early etcher, had the master of the collage stage “amusements on the cardboard stage” with his playful and sensual works, and courted a draughtsman whose sensibility reminds one of Wols and Cy Twombly, yet who searched, and found, differently. No matter whether he jotted the ephemeral traces of a nude or of floating landscapes, Bohrmann was able to suggest abundance with a line. He mistrusted the artful thoroughly.
He loved the preliminary and the unfinished, the open question. Yet he still wanted a moment to become timeless, to become an image. In his best works he succeeded in this more than many others did. Karl Bohrmann, born on October 29, 1928 in Mannheim, studied in 1948/49 with Willi Baumeister at the Academy in Stuttgart. During the sixties he lived in Munich, moved to Frankfurt when he became a teacher at the Städel, lived in Amsterdam, and at last in Cologne. 1985 the artist, who had already been decorated with several other awards, was accepted into the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste. At that time he did already have multiple sclerosis. In his last years, dependent on the wheelchair, he showed a working speed and productivity - as if all weight had fallen from him - which astonished all who knew him - and he had many friends. Karl Bohrmann died on December 17 in Cologne.