Ulrich Erben – Years. Years and days

Ulrich Erben’s earliest paintings were the nearly monochrome ›white paintings‹ executed around 1968, almost sixty years ago. They were dialogues in which the colour white and its affects gained a space of resonance. Yet they were not an act of devotion to a cool, totally isolated image, but rather a poetic sensuality of light, shadow and particles.

Robert Rauschenberg once said of his white paintings, created in 1951 at Black Mountain College, without knowing the works of Malevich: »I tried to get as far away as possible from any image and yet to have an image.« If, for Robert Rauschenberg, it was urban life and the rejection of any nobility of materials that led to a new pictorial language, for Ulrich Erben it was his early stay in Italy that evoked the tangible physicality of the Mediterranean, the landscape of light and its metamorphoses, the symbolic resonance of colours and forms. Ulrich Erben once described these works as ›colours of memory‹ – that quality of remembrance which, in his paintings, gave rise to ciphers of nature: a geometric delineation of nature.

In the new paintings presented in our exhibition – a group of ten works created last year – this geometry has largely been relinquished. Within the fields of colour there now speaks a flowing contextual richness: colour topographies that tell of the vibration of drawing light, of poetic gradations that appear within the painting like the changing seasons – hyperboles that respond from an inwardness to the landscape.

»Years. Years and Days« is the artist’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery. In 2019, Erben’s work was presented in a comprehensive retrospective at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop. In recent years, Ulrich Erben’s works have been shown in exhibitions at the Langen Foundation Neuss, the Museum Kurhaus Kleve and the Villa Brandolini in Pieve di Soligo (Veneto), amongst others. His works are held in renowned public and private museum collections such as the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and the Museum Reinhard Ernst, Wiesbaden.