Gerhard Hoehme is one of the most important painters of German Informel, to which he gave important and continuing impulses. As a member and chairman of the Düsseldorf "Gruppe 53" he was in close exchange with Peter Brüning, Winfred Gaul, Karl Otto Götz, Karl Fred Dahmen, Bernhard Schultze and Emil Schumacher. In the beginning, Gerhard Hoehme's artistic work focused on the theme of the painterly action and the artistic materials. The preoccupation with color characterized his early paintings and culminated in the so-called Borkenbilder, whose rough surface appeals less to the visual than to the haptics of the viewer. Around 1960, Hoehme's work increasingly developed scriptural structures. Cy Twombly, whom Hoehme met in Rome in 1960, as well as his involvement with French Tachism, especially Wols, provided important impulses for this development. The paintings of this period resemble polymorphous, calligraphic structures full of dynamism. Ciphers, line abbreviations, letters and numbers complement each other to form a harmonious overall picture. The so-called letter pictures are replaced by works that explore the relations between the picture and the viewer in a symbolic way. While Hoehme understands the works reminiscent of cutting patterns as an expression of a "need to survey the world," he aesthetically circles the question of the appropriate recipient of artistic intentions with the string object pictures that reach out into space.