Even during her academy years in the 1940s in Berlin, Ruth Baumgarte was already drawing male and female nudes seen from the back. Using an angular charcoal pencil, she explored anatomical details, focusing particularly on the shoulder area. In doing so, she placed herself within a long artistic tradition that spans from Michelangelo to figurative-expressionist painters such as Egon Schiele, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lucian Freud, and Rainer Fetting. Sculptors like Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel, and Georg Kolbe also engaged deeply with the theme of the back view and influenced the artistic treatment of this subject.

In the 1990s, Ruth Baumgarte’s visual language underwent another transformation, shaped by her intensive engagement with the light of the African continent. A key turning point was a journey to East Africa in 1991, which led to a radical shift in style. Beate Reifenscheid emphasizes: “What is special about these works from 1991 is not only the intensity of the coloration, but also the focused concentration on just a few pictorial figures... Figure and landscape become one here, symbolically emphasizing their symbiotic unity.”

The painting at hand is dominated by a male figure seen from the back. The back and arms are composed of impasto brushstrokes that form a dynamic all-over structure. The artist uses both pure and blended hues—such as yellow-orange and green-turquoise tones—to create fluid transitions in her application of color. From the cervical vertebrae, a brightening yellow flows downward, while the left arm visually merges into the background. The back becomes a living membrane, absorbing the surrounding flood of color.

In this oil painting, body and environment merge into a visionary unity—the body becomes landscape, and the landscape becomes body. This ritual symbiosis reveals an existential connection between nature, humanity, and spirit: a metaphor for the African continent and its almost mythical significance as the cradle of humankind.

An additional source of inspiration for Baumgarte was the East African Rift, a tectonic scar in the Earth’s crust that stretches over 6,000 kilometers from Mozambique to the Red Sea. This landscape, where the Earth opens up and continuously reshapes itself, is seen in Christian iconography as a kind of “cradle of humanity.” The deep fissures in the Earth’s crust, active volcanoes, and massive mountain formations such as Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya not only influence the climate but also symbolize the eternal creation and renewal of life.

Thus, Baumgarte’s back figure stands not only in the tradition of European depictions of the nude from behind but also within a broader symbolic context. As with Rodin or Claudel, the back becomes a projection surface for existential experiences—a resonance of the primordial, connecting with Africa’s deep tectonic past.