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Ulrike Theusner - Grelle Gegenwart

Förderung und Unterstützung
Die Ausstellung wird unterstützt durch die Ospa-Sitftung. Die Kunsthalle Rostock wird gefördert durch die Hanse- und Universitätsstadt Rostock und das Ministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur des Landes Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Kulturpartner: NDR Kultur

english version
“I need to leave the big wide world and at long last return to my small studio …”
Ulrike Theusner

Ulrike Theusner spent some time in France and the United States. She has travelled a lot. Back in her studio in Weimar she transformed the impressions gained during her travels into drawings and prints.

The exhibition Grelle Gegenwart (Glaring Present) brings together almost 170 works by Ulrike Theusner in Kunsthalle Rostock and is the first institutional solo show of the works of the artist, who was born in 1982 in Frankfurt/Oder.

Theusner’s works are primarily in colour and seem light and impulsive, attesting to her masterful handling of all graphic media. She relies on classic printing techniques, produces dry-point etchings as well as monotypes, and works with ink and pastel crayon. She loves to toy with references to art history. For example, the white heightening she chooses for her lines, the colourful spiral shapes, and the splintered fragments of colour are reminiscent of Edvard Munch and Van Gogh not to mention the bizarre masks of early Expressionist James Ensor.

Theusner takes stock of the age we live in as well as the mood in society. She creates images of the present, sometimes whimsical and seemingly hallucinatory. In the process, she resorts to the aesthetic of Instagram and the culture of selfies. She describes things she has seen in reality, but never does so realistically. In her pieces we find images of the present but likewise visions of the future, and insights into everything that is possible. The seemingly effusive wealth of subject matter arises from the tension between travel and retreat: She records quite bizarre scenes from big cities with virtuosity and a lightness of touch. The images include exotic couples, street buskers, artists, or portraits of young people who seem to have lost their bearings. Ulrike Theusner sucks up everything that she encounters visually and atmospherically and reproduces it with her own, always somehow slightly edgy and yet precise style of drawing.

A catalogue is appearing.

Picture credits:
Ulrike Theusner
Taylor with Mask, 2020
Pastel chalk on paper
50 × 34,7 cm
Privatbesitz, Leipzig
courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin