The studio. A former cotton mill in the west of Leipzig: third floor, north light.
Henrike Vahl was born in Rostock in 1989 and has lived in Leipzig since 2009. She paints the city’s water: the canals dug for the cotton trade, the locks and weirs that manage them, and the flood meadows that take what they cannot hold.
She studied painting in Leipzig and Rotterdam and put her brushes away in 2022. Since then every painting has been made with a palette knife, in oil, on linen or on gessoed board.
She finishes six to eight large paintings a year and about twenty small ones. Roughly a third of what she starts is destroyed.
Born
1989, Rostock
Lives
Leipzig, since 2009
Studied
Painting in Leipzig and Rotterdam, 2009–2015
Works in
Oil on linen and gessoed board
Collections
Private collections in Germany, the Netherlands and Japan
The painting wall, with nine metres to step back.
Vahl paints water the way other people describe weather: flatly, exactly, and with a great deal held back.
Marit Oswald,
Kunstblatt Mitte, 2025
The knife leaves nothing to hide behind. These are slow pictures that reward the second minute more than the first.
Jonas Ferreira,
Rotterdam Review of Painting, 2024
A lock, a weir, a kiln: three nouns, and nine years of looking at the same canal.
Elif Sander,
Elster Journal, 2026