Alte Meister | Filippino Lippi | o.t.

What is more mysterious than clarity? (Paul Valéry)

Ulrike Felder loves the great old masters of painting (Raphael, Ingres, Cranach). In her new series of works, she uses their characters to propose her own respectful and allusive interpretation.

Developing her own visual language in the way she relates bodies and backgrounds to each other, she creates an unusual tension and new meanings: the figures and shapes seem to be embedded in their spaces and yet detached, as if they exist between two worlds. The superimposition of humans, body parts, animals, plants, and objects translates into a powerful contrast between the apparent clarity of the depicted subjects and their otherworldly, dreamlike combination.

The human being is a central motif for the artist, although never as a classic portrait but rather as a fragment of a larger, hidden story. In her work, the classical figures of the old masters often contrast with natural plant forms from her own photographs. However, the background is by no means a random or neutral space, but a deliberately designed stillness that envelops her figures and endows them with a new presence. Between the elemental and the ephemeral, her collages evoke a world in which every new beginning carries a trace of the past.

Experimenting with new ways of seeing and inventing what has not yet been seen, Ulrike Felder explores the boundaries between photographic and painterly discourses. Her images are created in an internal configuration process, by careful observation and selection, reduction and condensation, the visual play with relationships, encounters, and isolation. The viewer is offered a double perspective: on the one hand, a macroscopic view of related families of paintings and recurring themes, and on the other, a close exploration of the creative process.

Ulrike Felder does not want to tell stories, but in the mind of the viewer, stories still emerge.

Text and translation: Cem Angeli

german

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