The ambivalence that can be observed in Posenenske's paintings on paper, such as that some works undermine informal gestuality, while others appear to affirm it, is less the expression of artistic indecisiveness than proof that in the early work, signature traits scarcely claimed reflexive space. This in no way indicates that Charlotte Posenenske would not have been aware of the dimension of gestural assertion, on the contrary: if we look at her early work up to and including 1964, it becomes evident that less than ten percent of her paintings are painted on fiberboard. There is no single work on canvas, instead oil, acrylic, poster paint, Indian ink, charcoal, and pencil on paper. Detached observation of the gesture as a category that constitutes the subject and that focuses excessive attention on the artist’s signature traits, overlooks the fact that in the case of Charlotte Posenenske the rhetoric of the signature traits goes hand-in-hand with a fragile temporariness and modesty of available means and formats. The foil, in front of which the informal pictorial language is presented, negates the latter's heroic stance and is to a certain extent contrasted with it. On top of which, Posenenske painted with a palette knife throughout, in other words she avoided subjectively connoted strokes of the brush at all costs.

If we remember that Charlotte Posenenske's break with her late work pained her, we must now have convinced the artist that the ambivalence and temporari-ness inherent in the early work rules out a model for a caesura. Furthermore-and this seems to me to carry far more weight as an argument-there is a continuous theme in Charlotte Posenenske' overall oeuvre, which varies in highly disparate ways: space.

— Philipp Kaiser, in Charlotte Posenenske: The Early Works, edited by Burkhard Brunn. Berlin: Distanz Verlag, 2012.