Bettina Heinen-Ayech

Bettina Heinen-Ayech (Solingen, 1937 - Munich, 2020) was a German painter best known for her colourful landscapes of Algeria, the country where she spent much of her adult life. Specialising in watercolour, she produced work that blends the Central European tradition with the light and scenery of North Africa.

She was the daughter of the journalist and poet Hanns Heinen and grew up in Solingen, in a home shaped by art. During the Second World War she lived with her mother and sister in Kreuzthal, near Isny in Allgäu, where she was joined by the painter Erwin Bowien, a friend of the family who became her first teacher and guide until his death in 1972. Between 1948 and 1954 she attended the August Dicke girls' secondary school in Solingen, then studied at the Cologne art schools, trained under Hermann Kaspar in Munich, and enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

Her first exhibition took place in 1955 in the assembly hall of Bad Homburg. That same year, some of her paintings were included in a group show of contemporary German art that toured South America, Africa and Asia alongside works by artists such as Paul Klee and Max Beckmann. In 1959 and 1962 she received scholarships from the North Rhine-Westphalia education ministry, and she worked as a painter on Sylt, in Ticino, in Norway and in Paris. In Paris she met the Algerian Abdelhamid Ayech, whom she later married. After the birth of her daughter Diana in 1961, the family moved to Guelma, her husband's home town, where she spent long periods working.

In Algeria she developed a personal technique. The dry air of Guelma made her watercolours dry quickly instead of blending as they did in Europe, so she learned to set strong colours side by side, brushstroke after brushstroke, like a mosaic. During the years of terrorism, from the 1990s into the 2000s, she could paint only portraits, still lifes and views from her window. Her landscapes of the region, with Mount Mahouna and fields of poppies, form the core of her output.

The Musée National des Beaux-Arts d'Alger acquired her first works in 1968, and in 1976 she received the Grand Prix de la ville d'Alger. In 1992 the same museum hosted a retrospective of 120 of her paintings, and in 2004 a second major exhibition was held in Algeria. Her first name, Bettina, is also said to have remained as her artistic name. Her life and work have been taken up in literature and film. She died in Munich in 2020, at the age of 82.