Orangery of the Botanical Garden
University of Münster
24.09.2011
[...] In Ursula Hierholzer’s paintings at the exhibition “Nature in Light”, the main theme is light and color. For example, park landscapes correspond as red contrast to blue and green under a slight, floating sky. The composition of the painting “A Hamlet” (Ortschaft) is the result of layering: at the bottom the green fields, above them perhaps houses in red before the structure of a wood. Created through the application of glazes, a ribbon of sky contrasting yellow into the background appears to be glowing. One is inclined to recognize an impressionist mode, where forms and colors are not presented as they are presumed to be, but as the artist sees them in an all-transforming light: As a sudden lighting up and then disappearing brightness, as a movement of the air, a tremor of the body. At the same time the historical principle of illumination, as for instance by Caravaggio, dissolve. The shadows sink away and the depicted world emerges as transformed phenomenon of natural light.
[...] Ms. Hierholzer’s concern is not a univocal articulation of space, composed within the confines of the picture. It is not her intention to provide an insight into the relationship between picture and nature, as in historical landscape painting. What she sees in nature is not the actual but rather the effectual: the light, its density and translucence, its irradiancy in which objects seem to dissolve, color without determined shape, which evoke the many-layered echoes of nature. Nature becomes an event of the eye. Seeing and its reflection become the culmination point for the artist’s creative work.
To speak once more with the words of Schelling: “The position of the artist toward nature should be clarified by the expression that art, in order to be art, needs to distance itself at first from nature and must only return to it in its final fulfillment.
A fragment of a poem by Hans Arp, “Singing Blue” seems nearly to be a Mission statement for the artist:
It sounds
It rustles
It resounds
It echoes
It sparkles
It emits fragrance
And becomes a pious singing blue.
The blue blossoms into light.
Dr. Michael Wessing, Kunsthistoriker, Münster
Translated by Dr. Erica Kuhrasch Paslick, University of Michigan, USA
