Eleonore Koch was born in Berlin to a Jewish family; her mother was a psychoanalyst, and her father, a lawyer. In 1936, to escape persecution, the family moved to Brazil, settling in São Paulo. She went on to become a painter and sculptor, closely aligned with her friend and mentor, the Brazilian painter Alfredo Volpi. She was best known for paintings that evoke the memory of everyday objects, while also exploring the sensory nature of painting through a tension between color planes and line. Unlike Volpi and many of her mid-century contemporaries, she would never embrace complete abstraction, always including allusions to the figure in her work, albeit never the human figure directly.