Exhibition
Ulf Puder
9 Jan 2019 – 10 Feb 2019
Address
- 299 Grand Street
- New York
New York - 10002
- United States
About
MARC STRAUS is pleased to announce our fourth solo exhibition of new paintings by the Leipzig painter Ulf Puder.
Ulf Puder belonged to the first generation of graduates from the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts and was on the forefront of a new movement known as The Leipzig School, whose visual language is characterized by both a strong narrative quality and a mastery of the brush. Puder’s work has long been influential to a younger generation of painters across Europe.
With turbulent skies and toppling buildings, Puder’s masterful paintings of apocalyptic landscapes depict desolation; in fact, they unabashedly present the beautiful power of Nature. Seeing relations between natural forces and human society, Puder reflects on this very coexistence-man-made structures and natural foliage stand side-by-side come what may.
Yet, there’s a disquieting familiarity to it all. Perhaps we’ve seen such scenes, glancing out the car on a road trip, or could it be our inner anxieties of urban loneliness manifested? Like Caspar David Friedrich, Puder’s paintings are perhaps elegies of the modern society. Puder takes the tradition of 17th century Dutch Golden Age masters such as Nicolaes Molenaer, updated with contemporary colors and abstraction. In his work, there is an indelible light vis-à-vis the human spirit that cannot be extinguished.