Born in 1958 in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, worked as a journalist, before she started  attending painting classes at the RHoK Academy in Brussels. She loves to work fast paced, hence mostly with acrylics, mixed media and collage/ décollage. Often she scrapes layers off, in order to leave traces of the previous working process visible. Though she is interested in a wide range of classical subjects (landscape, still life and portrait), dreams and visions of the interior world fascinate her most. Identity and disintegration, repetition and variation, perception and deception are topics that appear repeatedly in her work. She also seeks to combine painting with 3 D elements like tape, tissue, waste paper or cardboard in a sensible way.

Since 2013, she regularly participated in group exhibitions. In August 2014, she showed large drawings and arrachages at the International Summer Academy Exhibition in Salzburg. In 2016, Renate Kohl was "student in situ" at RHoK Woluwe, in January 2017 "artist in situ" at the Flemish community centre KONTAKT in Woluwe-Saint Pierre. In 2017, she became a member of the Brussels Circle of Diplomatic Artist (Brucoda). In 2018 she joined W-o-l-k-e. In 2019, she took part in the Innocence exhibition at the RHoK Academy in Brussels-Etterbeek, together with Eve Lucas and Nathalie De Maere Paternostre. Since 2020 she is living in Berlin.