Ulrich Erben (Düsseldorf, 1940), is a historical representative of aniconic painting that developed in various national declinations starting from the Seventies. The movement was born as a reaction of some groups of artists to the conceptual dictatorship in vogue at the time, which supported the definitive overcoming and imminent cessation of pictorial practice: its exponents were united by the desire to safeguard painting and legitimize its existence by supporting the analytical methods of its detractors. The analytical line of art, in fact, examined the mechanisms inherent in the act of painting and the relationships between its founding elements (surface, support, color, sign) using the same procedures with which their conceptual colleagues were in the meantime investigating the aesthetics of reality.
Ulrich Erben, “Frammenti al Kappa-Nöun”, installation view, courtesy Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
Painting abandoned every external referent to become the subject of itself, based on the assumption that the artist’s action and his trace on the canvas were able to attest to the concept of the work in its purest form, sometimes retaining some emotional thrill. Pittura-Pittura, Pittura Analitica, Nuova Pittura, Support-Surface, Post-minimal painting and Radical Painting are some of the main international currents in which this trend was articulated in those years, with which Erben shared an aspiration to objectivity (at the expense of the author’s subjectivity) based on an essential language that starts from a sort of “zero degree” of the image. His work, from the first landscapes and still lifes, expresses interest in the relationships between geometry, architecture and nature and in the interpenetration between the physical and illusory spatiality of the art work. He understands colour as a presence, free from any referential intent: recalling Mark Rothko’s research, Erben’s chromatic layers influence each other, creating energy fields that interact with the atmospheric light and the texture of the supporting canvas, enhancing its qualities.
Ulrich Erben, S.T., 2024, acrylic and pigments on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, courtesy Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
His highly refined painting focuses on the investigation of perceptive problems and reveals the delicate balance between intuition and precision that distinguishes his approach to visual experience. Compared to the admittedly cold matrix of the pictorial experiences mentioned above (which nevertheless constitute an essential root), in him the fascination for geometric abstraction overlaps with that for light and color, because only through the complementarity of these two elements the image can find its own existence space. This last characterizing aspect is a possible consequence of both an uninterrupted connection with Italy, starting from his youthful education in Rome where he fell in love with Renaissance painting, and of his connection with German Romantic culture, evident in his sensitivity in receiving the changing atmospheric suggestions of the landscape in chromatic and luminous terms.
Ulrich Erben, S.T., 2024, acrylic and pigments on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, courtesy Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
The artist has a long-standing relationship with the city of Bologna in particular, which began with the solo exhibition Ritorno (1994) at the Studio G7 gallery, then managed by the historic founder Ginevra Grigolo, whose legacy was taken up in 2019 by Giulia Biafiore. The young gallery owner has maintained the orientation of her exhibition choices focused on the same conceptual and abstract line, combining her personal research path in the field of emerging artists with continuity with the great masters from previous generations already present in the gallery, such as Giulio Paolini, Anne and Patrick Poirier, David Tremlett, Franco Guerzoni and, indeed, Ulrich Erben. And it is thanks to the collaboration with Studio G7 that the Frammenti exhibition at Kappa-Nöun was born in the space of the collector Marco Ghigi in San Lazzaro di Savena (BO), where the German artist was invited. The first idea of this new solo show was to exhibit a painting from the 70s with a reference to Morandi as a tribute to the host city, transformed during the gestation into a site-specific project inspired by the large vaulted wall opposite the entrance that indelibly characterizes the architecture of the room dedicated to the exhibitions, a former industrial pastry shop.
Ulrich Erben, S.T., 2024, acrylic and pigments on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, courtesy Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
It was precisely the vision of that wall, which the artist came into contact with months ago during an inspection of the empty location, that awakened in him a reminiscence of the archaeological site of Selinunte, in itself a grandiose Mediterranean elegy of the fragment and the ruin silhouetted against the sky, of which he keeps a photo in his Düsseldorf studio depicting a column bathed in sunlight. In the wake of this intuition, Erben decided to activate the wall of the Kappa-Nöun by interpreting it as the facade of a Greek temple, specifically Temple C of the Sicilian park, and then to explore its rhythmic scansion and the quality of light through painting so that the spectator, even in the absence of recognizable figurative elements, could project the image of a landscape with ruins onto it. The six Doric columns placed on the front of the peristyle around the cell of the Greek building correspond to the six square-format paintings created for this exhibition, which follow one another on the wall separated by intervals equivalent to their width. As a whole, the installation (including the wall) returns in fragments a conceptualized image of the temple, reasoning on an idea of theoretical and visual verticality that starts from the introjection of the grooves of the columns into the pictorial gesture to generate in each painting a different sequence of perpendicular bands.
Ulrich Erben, S.T., 2024, acrylic and pigments on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, courtesy Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
Like all of Erben’s works, this series is also the consequence of a process that constantly declares itself by scanning the structure of visual language to arrive at a construction that, starting from a syntactic reflection on the elementary categories of painting, comes to touch on the imponderable. In fact, even if at first glance the paintings on display seem so similar as to suggest a modular repetition, a slightly longer observation time makes it clear that the predominant blacks, grays and whites are never the same. In each field the colors visually contaminate each other with different intensities depending on their reciprocal power balance, fading into one another through almost imperceptible gradations, further enriched by pink or blue nuances that suggest the atmospheric ancestry of the image.
Ulrich Erben, “Frammenti al Kappa-Nöun”, installation view, courtesy Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
If from afar the design that marks the vertical scores within each surface appears clear, as we get closer the assertiveness of the main shades appears attenuated by an imperfect coincidence between design and chromatic background, as well as by the emergence of “hidden” shades that obscure the geometric grid in favor of a canon hinged on a hypothetical landscape, exactly like the Doric columns of the Sicilian temple. The alternation of light and dark, moreover, fulfills the double function of suggesting both the depth and the reliefs of the grooves, and an alternation of lights and shadows that we could read as a synthesis of a landscape made of marble, earth, dust, sun, sky and sea that changes with the succession of the hours and the seasons. This small, precious exhibition, which we suggest visiting slowly in order to appreciate its visual and conceptual subtleties, is paradigmatic, therefore, of the fundamental aspects of the artistic practice of Ulrich Erben, a great colour master who remained faithful throughout his long career to a language capable of combining sensitivity and calculation without becoming rigid in sterile theorems, while not admitting exceptions to the rigor of his creative process.
Info:
Ulrich Erben: Frammenti al Kappa-Nöun
03/02/2025 – 25/03/2025
Text by Davide Ferri
Kappa-Nöun
Via Imelde Lambertini 5, San Lazzaro di Savena (BO)
www.instagram.com/kappa_noun
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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