Exhibition Ulric Eller-Rutter "ANALOG". Painting and Performance Automatic translate

At the exhibition of German artist Ulrike Eller-Rutter, we are talking about a sensually perceptible "other component", opposed to the hypertrophied "digitization" of our time. Direct live experience and touch, and not the reproduction of reality through a touchscreen.

The exhibition is based on the idea of ​​shadows, which are presented in two media: painting and performance. In Ulrika’s work, the shadows are assigned the role of the main characters - dominating in the flickering, fleetingly drawn color relationships, they form the main plot of her works.

The objects themselves, “sources of shadow”, are cut off by the edge of the canvas, and simply disappear from view. The artist in her works shows a transient perception of time in space - as a nonexistent, easily changing shadow. The leitmotif is the story of the secondary nature of phenomena that occur in the outer space and are transferred to the inner by applying to the canvas.

This theme goes through all of Ulrike Eller-Rutter’s work. Her collection of shadows is regularly replenished during numerous travels and art interventions in open areas. The artist explores the hidden, invisible aspects of human life in various formats and creative manifestations. In numerous appearances at exhibitions and performances held in Poland, Palestine, Romania, South Africa, Iran and China, a special place is given to the theme of human destinies. The artist often touches on the problems of modern society, turns to its marginal strata and focuses on the fates of people unclaimed by society who find themselves in the shadow of today’s world.

In her own, the artist gives the shadows movement and, through interaction with light painting and live performance of arias and songs, creates the effect of a multi-level effect. In the twilight of the insertion room, the artist creates the so-called “opposing space” - enlivens the walls and floors, turning them into projection surfaces. Phosphorescent canvases are hung between the real exhibits of the exhibition, onto which the shadows of performance spectators are projected and fixed for an instant. Phosphorescent pigment fixes in memory - time. Sound is added to the luminous canvases, enhancing the visual impact and interacting with the “analog” concept of the exhibition. What is happening turns into a spectacular performance, into a representation of light, the shadow of sound.

Musically accompanied by Friedman Geisler (piano, organ, percussion), Ulrika performs fragments from baroque arias, oratorios and operas by Bach, Handel, Purcell, Pergolesi. The artist creates a kind of collage from these works with fragments of the songs of Schubert and Mahler, interrupted by a part of percussion and works of modern composers - for example, Nellie Sachs “Shadow Choir”. Everything that happens revolves around those: Shadow, Darkness, Death and Fear. The illusion of the movement of time, with shadows floating out of nowhere and again plunging into nowhere, is recreated in a slide stop-motion show.

In one of her works, the artist, through a rigorous experiment, recorded on seventeen sheets the movement of the shadow of a dried agave flower during a ten-hour sunny day. She redrawn it every half hour, watching how the shadow entered the picture, wandering around the surface, constantly changing shape, and finally disappearing. This series formed the basis of the work “Sundial” presented at the exhibition.

Shadow performances, the idea of ​​which was born in 2012 and which were constantly transformed, taking on new forms of expression, were presented to the general public in Shanghai, Tehran, Krakow (in Montelupih prison, and the performance took place in a prison cell with the involvement of one of the prisoners), Rome (Pantheon), in the churches of Bonn and Cologne.

Ulrike Eller-Rutter lives and works in Bonn and Wuppertal, she is a professor at the Department of Painting and Contemporary Art at the Academy of Arts and Social Sciences. (Die Alanus Hochschule für Kunst und Gesellschaft, Alfter).

In Russia, the works of Ulriki are presented for the first time.

The exhibition runs from December 14 to December 24, 2017.