Rissa (*1938), who studied with K.O. Götz in Düsseldorf (1959–1965), decided in 1964, after coming to terms with cubism, expressionism and art informel, on a new kind of figurative painting, which she defined as a synthesis of object-related and abstract approaches. Her pictorial conception is not based on a three-dimensional representation, but on small-scale structures of form and colour, which in juxtaposition produce the contours of the pictorial objects. Rissa's monumental painting The Great Couple (1980) clearly shows how, in a space without any perspective construction, »snippets of colour« – placed side by side with smooth layers of paint – build up the rhythm of the picture in such a way that the internal forms constitute almost autonomous-abstract plots following a pattern all of their own.

Quite different are the carefully constructed compositions of Almut Heise (*1944). The artist, who studied painting with Gotthard Graubner and David Hockney in Hamburg in the 1960s and with Peter Blake in London (1970–71), received impulses from English Pop Art, but New Objectivity painting and artists such as Balthus or Francis Bacon were also important to her. In her meticulously executed works, Heise depicts interiors along with a repertoire of people in detail. Every fold, every wallpaper pattern and every gesture is tried out until the »longed-for rooms« have emerged. Thus, a painting such as Great Museum Scene I (1989) dislocates the champagne reception common in a museum context into a cool, surreal-looking scenery by combining, as if on a stage, antique sculpture fragment and plaster copy with two nudes gazing defiantly out of the picture and a design icon of the '50s.

Birgitt Bolsmann (1944–2000) already tried her hand at a reality orientated painting while still studying in Hamburg with Hans Thiemann and Kurt Kranz. She draws her subjects largely from fashion photography and striking advertising, examining them in terms of the image of women that they propagate. In a multi-layered painting process she fixes her subjects with great clarity using a cool colour scheme. The large painting Escape from Patriarchy (1986) reflects her critical view of the male-dominated art world: in a pictorial space constructed à la de Chirico, the ideal of sculpture for centuries, Michelangelo's David, firmly holds a snake – symbol of the feminine – while two female figures hastily flee this stage.