Ulf Puder Exhibition
Ana Cristea gallery
This event has ended.
Ana Cristea Gallery presents artist Ulf Puder's first solo show in New York. Puder's quiet yet forceful paintings depict an uninhabited world composed of vast, luminous skies and off-kilter man-made structures. Employing a distinctive color palette dominated by grays and pastels and a visual language that is both figurative and highly-abstracted, Puder creates images that are as inexplicably beautiful as they are haunting.
In works like Waldbad and Schwestern, house-like structures are composed of flat and weightless planes of color, but some of these planes are askew or simply missing. The two bungalows in Schwestern are so battered that they appear almost entirely open to the elements, and stray walls float in what seems to be an expanse of water covering the ground. Offenes Gelände suggests a slightly new direction for the artist: Puder's paintings have often suggested the disarrayed and desolate aftermath of an unidentified natural disaster, but in this painting, which depicts a massive tornado approaching a backdrop of low-slung buildings, we seem to be witnessing the moment just before the destruction begins.
Born in Leipzig in 1958, Ulf Puder was a member of the now-famed first generation to graduate from the Leipziger Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. Along with Neo Rauch, also a member of this first generation, Puder was uniquely successful in melding East-German neo-realism with a more imaginative, dreamlike, even surrealistic vocabulary. His work is greatly admired by and has had a tremendous influence on a younger generation of Eastern European artists.
[Image: Ulf Puder "Niedrigwasser" (2010) Oil on canvas 20 x 23.5 in]
Media
Schedule
from January 13, 2011 to February 19, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-01-13 from 18:00 to 20:00