She graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1978 as a student of Klaus Rinke, where some of her fellow students were accepted into the circle of Neue Wilden. Loch exhibited with members of the New German Painting, but despite the apparent parallels, her path led her in a different direction. She began painting landscapes of mountains as early as the 1980s, before, following a radical turn of events in her life, she retired from the art world and travelled to the Swiss mountains to settle down. In 1988, before her departure, she exhibited small-scale landscapes in Cologne. In 1989, she exhibited installation-like paintings of larger-than-human-sized flowers and sensuous red rose petals at the same place. She did not bother with titles, her paintings were numbered, her basic tool was a mixture of colour, natural precision and stylization. Her work questions the very essence of kitsch. Far from sweetness, her large-scale floral paintings reflect states of being. The models, which often appear against a dark background, are not botanical, but evoke a sinister, oppressive effect with their scale. Her paintings include landscapes and animals alongside flowers, and her final period contains a number of black and white abstract works.
Andrea Tarczali