Charlotte Posenenske (b. 193, Wiesbaden, d. 1985, Frankfurt) was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, and spent the majority of her childhood in hiding during Nazi rule. The artist began studying painting in 1951 under Willi Baumeister in Stuttgart before working as a set and costume designer in Darmstad until 1955. She later focused her attention towards art, participating in her first exhibition in 1959 at Galerie Weiss, Kassel. Her first solo show, in 1961, was at Galerie Dorothea Loehr in Frankfurt. Throughout the sixties her work gained wide recognition in Germany and abroad until, in 1968, she turned instead to sociology, the study of which she pursued until the end of her life in 1985. In 2007, when she was featured in documenta 12, her work was rediscovered on a broader scale.
Since then, Posenenske’s work has been the subject of many solo exhibitions including ones at Dia: Beacon, New York (2019), Galerie Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin (2017), Take Ninagawa, Tokyo (2016), Artists Space, New York (2010), K21, Düsseldorf (2012), and Kunsthalle Wiesbaden (2012). Recent group exhibitions include Museum Heilbronn, Germany (2018), National Gallery, Singapore (2018), MMK, Frankfurt (2017), Bortolami Gallery, New York (2016), the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, and the 2012 Bienal de São Paulo. Her work is in the permanent collections of many prestigious institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Tate Modern (London), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), and MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt am Main).