Ève Gramatzki’s childhood was marked by two successive tragedies: the death of her mother three months after the birth of her brother, and the 1944 Allied bombing of her hometown and the arrival of the Russian army, which forced her family to take refuge in Hamburg. From 1956 to 1961, she studied there at the School of Fine Arts, where she received an education strongly influenced by constructivism. At first, the young artist’s style gravitated toward a form of hyperrealism. While living in Paris from 1972 to 1980, she drew discarded objects, depicting the weave of clothes and worn fabric with great subtlety and delicacy, with no background or props to distract from the construction of the drawing. This study of texture led her to consider seemingly insignificant objects: her drawings breathed new life into a simple tea towel or a piece of kitchen roll, adorning them with undulating geometrical patterns. The highlighting of the very structure of the drawn materials would prefigure the shift of the artist’s work from realism to abstraction. In 1980, she moved to a farmhouse in the heart of the Ardèche countryside, with no access to electricity or drinking water. It was during this thirteen-year retreat that she began to focus less on objects than on motifs, textures and woven patterns, making them the main focuses of her work. While 1980s art gravitated toward a return to figuration, she continued to explore abstraction, although she never completely cut out subjective depiction. Linear structures gradually gave way to paintings and drawings that showed great freedom of composition and expression. Under her pencil or brush, lines became unstructured, fragmented, dissolved. These chaotic works convey a sense of both violence and passion.

Starting in 1995, she divided her time between the south of France and Paris, where the municipality granted her a studio. The sale of her farmhouse in 2000 forced her to move to Paris permanently. This last period of E. Gramatzki’s life is characterised by her return to structure, particularly in the form of very tightly drawn grids interspersed with small, translucent, coloured dots. These works stand midway between her early fabric drawings and her Ardèche period. She took her own life in 2003.