Fonds F0651 - Ingeborg Mohr fonds

Ingeborg Mohr, artist, was born in Innsbruck, Austria, on December 8, 1921. At 18 she was diagnosed with polio and was dissuaded from becoming an artist. Consequently, she attended the University of Breslau in Germany from September 1943 to February 1945 to study art history. In 1947 Ingeborg resumed her pursuit of a career in art. She took studio classes at the School of Fine Arts in Linz, Austria, while also working at the International Refugee Organization, and at a publishing house as a freelance book and magazine illustrator. In 1952 Ingeborg was accepted into the Master Class at the School of Fine Arts in Graz, Austria. Between 1951 and 1952 she also worked as a counselor for the National Catholic Welfare Conference for refugees in Austria. Ingeborg married J.W. (Hans) Mohr in 1952, and they emigrated to Canada in 1954 with their children. While in Saskatchewan, Ingeborg focused on painting the prairie landscape and skies with watercolors. In 1955 Ingeborg and her family moved to Toronto, Ontario, where she was influenced by abstract impressionism resulting in the evolvement of her style from representational to non-objective painting. She worked in batik for four years after the move to Toronto and turned to using oil paints on paper after 1971. In 1981 she and her husband moved to Howe Island, near Kingston, Ontario, where she continued to paint and exhibit. She was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1980 and the Ontario Society of Artists in 1975. Ingeborg's work was exhibited widely across Canada, including the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Trent University, Massey College of the University of Toronto, the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre, Imperial Oil, Goethe-House, Simon Fraser Gallery, and Merton Gallery. Her work was held in private, public and corporate collections in Europe, Canada, and the United Sates. Ingeborg died on January 5, 2004.