German painter, draughtswoman and poet, known as Ursula, born on 17 November 1921 in Mittenwalde (Brandenburg), died on 9 April 1999 in Cologne.
Life
The daughter of Erwin Bluhm, Ursula worked at the Amerika-Haus in Frankfurt, where in 1949 she met the painter Bernard Schultze, whom she married in 1955. She began painting and writing in 1950, starting from the abstraction of Willi Baumeister, then found a personal path between naive painting, Art Brut and the Informel. For almost fifty years the couple shared the same studio, each following their own path.
In 1954 she met Jean Dubuffet, with whom she formed a lasting friendship; her works entered the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne. Self-taught, she nonetheless remains unclassifiable: in 1961, in the review La Brèche, André Breton linked her work to “the automatism of mediums”. She took part in documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977. Settled in Cologne with her husband, she lived there until her death.
The work
Ursula made ink drawings, large paintings and, from the late 1950s, assemblages in soft materials, notably fur, studded with drawing pins and razor blades; around 1970 she also created installations occupying space, then called “environments”. Her sinuous compositions, built up from patterns of dots and lines, are peopled with beings that dance, fly and metamorphose (Andrew Russeth, The New York Times, 16 May 2023).
“The image is lodged in my mind and waits to be released into the outside world, onto the canvas.” (Ursula)
Exhibitions and collections
- Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris.
- documenta 6, Kassel, 1977.
- Ursula: That’s Me. So What?, first major retrospective, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2023, curated by Stephan Diederich; the gallery lent five works.
- It’s Me, Ursula! Paintings, Drawings, Boxes, with Yolande Fièvre, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 14 March to 12 April 2025.
- Monograph and catalogue raisonné: Evelyn Weiss, Ursula, Hirmer, 2007.