Christa Walhof is a german artist.
She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where she was influenced by artists such as Jörg Immendorff and Bernhard Johannes Blume, both associated with Documenta. Her work has been acquired by public and private collections, including the Neue Pinakothek Munich, and has been exhibited internationally.

From the beginning, Walhof’s practice has been shaped by a critical engagement with painting itself. At a time when painting was widely declared obsolete, she deliberately chose to continue working within the medium, testing its limits rather than abandoning it. This decision remains central to her work today.

After an early phase of large-format figurative paintings and a temporary shift toward video works addressing gender-related themes, Walhof returned to painting with a radical reduction of subject matter. She chose the horse — traditionally considered one of the most conventional motifs in art history — as a deliberate challenge. Stripped of symbolism, narrative, or irony, the motif demands precision: a horse must read unmistakably as a horse.

In Walhof’s large-scale paintings, the horse becomes a site of tension between realism and projection, control and vitality. The works resist anecdote while remaining physically present and visually direct. Although grounded in photographic sources, their impact is inseparable from scale, surface, and the changing conditions of light.

In recent years, Walhof has used the motif of the horse as a transatlantic artistic framework, drawing on American imagery as a way to reflect on cultural memory, power structures, and the shifting relationship between nature and society. The political dimension is not overt, but embedded — available to be read, or deliberately ignored.