URSULA
On November 17, 1921, the painter Ursula Schultze-Bluhm, who went by the name “Ursula”, was born in Mittenwalde (Brandenburg). She died on April 9, 1999 in Cologne. In her generation Ursula was one of the still very few women in art. In her painting she is unique. Own and the obsessions as well as aggressions of others she sublimated into a representationally designed world from the delicate ink pen drawing to sheer tearing form and color in the large painting to the third dimension in soft materials, such as fur, but peppered with tacks and razor blades, which could develop from the surface to reliefs or to independent sculptural formations, her “assemblages”, or - around 1970 - even to room-filling as well as room-filling installations, then still called “environments”.
Ursula experienced the decline and collapse of Central Europe at first hand in her formative third decade of life. She helped to shape the reconstruction as an employee of the Amerika-Haus in Frankfurt am Main, where she met the painter Bernard Schultze, whose life and work companion she became with admirable intensity until her death. In 1950 she began to paint, starting from the two-dimensional abstraction of Willi Baumeister, for example, but after a short time found a personal concretion in the field of tension between naive painting, art brut and Informel. Despite fifty years of working with Bernard Schultze in the same room, the positions of both never approached each other, but rather developed individually in constant discussion and confrontation. Ursula created her own “individual mythology” as a woman, which makes her appear lonely and large in her generation of artists, still completely dominated by men.
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