During her time living in the UK, Eleonore Koch produced a number of lighthouse scenes. Their compositions closely mirror the artist’s photographs from trips to Wilhelmshaven and Emden in East Frisia, Germany, with the lighthouse’s stepped structure and red stripes also resembling Beachy Head Lighthouse in East Sussex, a short journey from London. Comparing her paintings using repeated motifs such as the lighthouse, it becomes clear that they are less topographical landscapes and more imagined compositions, with the same landscape features frequently transplanted into different settings.

The quiet stillness of these scenes, devoid of people, and the unusual perspective created by the extended planes of block colour contribute to this surreality, diffusing many of Koch’s paintings with a dreamlike quality.

Reflecting on her time in Europe, Koch stated that she had always felt like an ‘intruder.’ Dislocation is a common theme in writing on her work: as an immigrant to Brazil and then a foreigner in London, her pictorial world has been considered a product of this rootlessness, both a synthesis of objects and influences from her various homes, and its own suspended reality. Her paintings are not records of distinct places and moments in time, but a separate world that she built around herself as a permanent home.