Ulrike Stadler “A Retrospective”

Amos Eno Gallery

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Multidisciplinary artist Ulrike Stadler (1942-2019) was celebrated as an accomplished artist and served as a member of Amos Eno Gallery beginning in 1996. Stadler’s retrospective honors her work as a painter, print maker, and sculptor, exhibiting works spanning across the past thirty years of her career.

Stadler exhibited with Amos Eno for over twenty-five years. Her work was also shown at Wingspread Gallery (Northeast Harbor, Maine) over twenty years. Her legacy encompasses numerous solo and group shows, and her work is held in private collections in the U.S. and abroad.

Born in Germany in 1942, Stadler received a degree in Art from the Klosterschule in Hamburg, and then studied Philosophy and Medieval Languages at the University of Hamburg. In 1965, Stadler immigrated to New York City, living in the Upper West Side and renting a loft on the Bowery to house her art studio; sculptures representing this period are included in the Retrospective exhibit. Twenty years later, Stadler moved to Maine permanently, where she continued to work throughout her life.

In 2001, Stadler opened the eponymous Stadler Gallery for Contemporary Art in Maine’s Carrabassett Valley, where she made a commitment to providing artists in all stages of their career with dedicated exhibitions. She became an anchor that helped revitalize the town’s arts community. It was in this region of northern Maine where she completed the bulk of the collection currently on display at Amos Eno.

Stadler experimented with many techniques and approaches to transform the surface of the canvas. With this innovative mindset, she began using natural materials such as burlap, birch bark, and kozo fibers. She even adapted pigment application by changing the paint itself, from oil-based and encaustic (pigmented beeswax) to egg tempera. Stadler was enthusiastic in finding ways to express compositions, at times moving off the canvas entirely and experimenting with gelatin monotype printmaking. “I always like to learn and teach myself new things,” she once remarked. When Stadler decided to start painting with encaustic, she reflected, “I bought myself a book and a minimal set of supplies and went ahead. It became a terrific journey into totally new territory of texture and color.”

“Her art was often an experiment,” explains Pelham Art Center-exhibiting Melita Westerlund, internationally known sculptor, fiber artist, and decades-long friend and neighbor of Stadler’s in Bar Harbor, Maine. It is in this sense of forging new horizons that Amos Eno presents this look back across the astounding breadth and scale of works that Stadler produced over her active career full of curiosity and exploration.