Ulrich Erben


Ulrich Erben is a German painter. From 1980 to 2005, he was a Professor of Painting at the Kunstakademie Münster. He is known as a master of the color field style of abstract painting, closely related to abstract expressionism, in which he creates tension between a defined surface structure, his own method of applying paint to a canvas, and the relationship of various shades of white or color to each other in their placement as part of a composition on the flat plane of a canvas. In 1986 and 2008, he was awarded the Konrad-von-Soest Prize for Visual Arts by the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe.

Life and Work

Ulrich Erben spent his youth on the Lower Rhine and in Rome, where his family moved in 1956. From 1958 to 1965, he studied painting, graphic techniques, fresco painting and drawing at art academies in Hamburg, Urbino, Venice, Munich and Berlin. Starting his career with landscapes and still lifes, his paintings increasingly used geometric forms. During this period he divided his time between Italy and his homeland on the Lower Rhine, interrupted by a longer stay in Paris in 1963.
In 1966, Erben married the writer Ingrid Bachér and returned to the lower Rhine. In 1967, he took his first sojourn in the United States, where, in an intensive personal confrontation with landscape and architecture and their mythological meaning, he reduced the use of forms and colors in his works. Already in these early years of his career, "the landscape as bearer of memory turns into a central category of Erben's art."

1968-1977

In 1968, Erben created his first "weiße Bilder". They are defined by a white zone in the center of the painting, which is distinct from the matte background, which is a dimmer white background. In this process Erben developed his primary theme of the reciprocal as understood in relationship to objectless and simple form-areas. He was interested particularly in the boundaries of connections; in the formation of space without perspective; and in the underlayment of white and, later, colored surfaces with paint layers of barely perceptible varying tonality.
In 1972, Erben began his "weiße Bilder" period of white-on-white paintings, in which he engages with manipulated light effects to create light objects and murals. He showed his first light object installation, Lichtraum in the "Szene Rhein Ruhr '72" exhibition at the Grugapark in Essen, organized by Dieter Honisch of the Museum Folkwang. There he hung an unpainted canvas behind a wall of stretched gauze and illuminated it with a halogen light from the front and the back sides, thus producing the illusion of an actual painting.
In 1975, Erben moved to Düsseldorf, where he is a neighbor of the artist Günther Uecker, without relinquishing his house in Goch on the lower Rhine. In the further development of his "weiße Bilder", the first colored, almost monochrome, works emerged in 1977, and were exhibited at documenta 6 in Kassel.

1978-2014

In 1978, Erben's paintings changed dramatically. He now joined pure colors and irregular forms on his canvases in a single painting process; he used it to create the "prima-vista" series, as well as paintings on bounded and unbounded space, "Interieurs" and "Exterieurs". Yet here as well the "relationship of tension between painterly autonomy and formal order" is a determining principle. From 1979 on, Erben has also created large spatial works, which consist of individual, serially arranged sheets of paper. The transformation of real space through painting repeatedly became the subject of his work.
In 1980 Erben was appointed Professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Münster Division. He has been a professor emeritus there since 2005.
In 1988 Erben returned to stricter geometrical image partitions in his works, which display a clear connection to the early "weiße Bilder". In this changed painting technique using acrylic and pigments, a series of paintings arose that Erben calls "Farben der Erinnerung" : paintings whose colors mutually intensify one another into a luminous appearance that balances harmony and disharmony. A comparable, but even more enhanced, space and light effect is developed in the work group "Siria" from 2009–2010, which harkens back to a journey he made in 2007 through the desert landscapes of Syria.
In 1992, Erben became a member of the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. On the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Shiga Museum of Modern Art in Osaka, he took a study trip to Japan.
Since 1993, Erben has been creating site-specific wall arrangements in public buildings in Hannover, Essen, Stuttgart and Berlin, among others. He also has wall paintings or installations for temporarily conceived spaces in museums or in the context of exhibition projects.
Since 1988, he has also been using oil paint, initially for more representational small-format paintings, with echoes of Italian landscape motifs, under the theme "was ich sehe". He began using oil paint for large-format, multi-panel paintings, and is increasingly taking up earlier themes and interpreting them anew.
Subsequent to the "Siria" work group, Erben's paintings from 2010 on show a greater variety of geometric forms and their arrangements. As of 2014, through muted color transitions, Erben brings immaterial movement and simultaneously luminous quietude into his paintings, which are designated by the collective title "Festlegung des Unbegrenzten" .
Ulrich Erben lives and works in Düsseldorf, Goch, and Bagnoregio.

Awards

Solo exhibitions

1973 Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf: Prospect 73 – Maler, Painters, Peintres
1977 Documenta 6, Kassel
1982 Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin: Hommage à Barnett Newman
1985/1986 Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin: Kunst in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. 1945 –1985

Related literature / Exhibition catalogues