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until 10.11. | #2871ARTatBerlin | Galerie Brockstedt will be showing an exhibition of paintings and watercolours from 50 years of the artist Natascha Ungeheuer from 24 September 2020. The Natascha Ungeheuer Archive has been in existence at the Academy of Arts since the beginning of September 2020.
„Natascha Ungeheuer ist ein malender Utopist deutscher Sprache. (Natascha Ungeheuer is a painting utopian of German language.)“
Johannes Schenk
“Natascha Ungeheuer was born as Ursula Rosa Ungeheuer in Blumenfeld. She spent her childhood in Biederbach (Black Forest). She went to school in Freiburg (Breisgau). A-levels in Stuttgart. Teacher’s examination at the Pädagogische Hochschule Lüneburg in 1959, followed by the Harald Kreuzberg Dance Academy in Bern. From 1961 she travelled alone through England, Ireland, Finland, France and Italy.
In 1962 she came to Berlin. She drew more and more often. Soon followed oil painting. She did not take art lessons and was consciously self-taught. She did not look for role models in art and did not give her painting style a name. Her old-masterly painting style with finest brushes depicts people. Phantasmagoric realism’ would be an obvious term that most closely describes her painting. From 1966 (Kunsthalle Netzel in Worpswede) she had exhibitions at home and abroad. From 1964 to 2006 she lived in Berlin and Worpswede with her partner Johannes Schenk, who died suddenly on 4 December 2006. From 1969-1975 she played in the Kreuzberg street theatre, painted stage sets and made masks. She also illustrated books and her pictures often ended up on book covers. Now she lives in Berlin.”
“It is very well conceivable that the glory of life is ready around everyone and always in all its fullness, but imposed, in depth, invisible, very far. But it lies there, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which does not create, but calls.” (Franz Kafka, Diaries 1921)
It is as if Franz Kafka had written these words on her body: The image-poet Natascha Ungeheuer, whose humorously winking dark eyes flash with indomitable curiosity and lust for life to this day.
From the very beginning, it had an unmistakable visual language that constantly circles around man, with everything – good and bad – that he carries around with him. With her exuberant joy of narration, she literally captures the concentrated life in her pictures, and in her extensive and masterly precision work, she lovingly devotes herself to every detail, no matter how small, which sometimes helps to decipher her message.
With a sharp analytical eye, she puts the human psyche in all its manifestations in the limelight and explains the narrative connections in the smallest detail. What at first appears to the viewer as a dream through her bubbling imagination, she describes as unvarnished truth. And as if she wanted to underline this, one often discovers recognizable figures of her own life reality – often herself and Johannes Schenk.
Natascha Ungeheuer, Aufgeklappter Bürokrat, 1977, 50 x 60 cm, Oil on Canvas
The painter generously invites us to dwell on her very personal stories, to deepen our knowledge. Only on closer inspection do her picture puzzles reveal themselves and they emerge anew in our own imagination from a variety of familiar symbols and allegories, touching our own pictures in our souls and inspiring us to make associations.
Isn’t it precisely our very personal stories, this unmistakable trace of ourselves, that give each other the emotional support we need in the midst of the modern world of increasing economic, digital and scientific objectification and, not least, moral absurdity? In sharing these stories we encourage each other.
Natascha Ungeheuer, Freispiel bei 687 points, 1970, 60 x 70, Oil on Canvas
Here we can listen to a fiery storyteller who, with humour and a wink of the eye, does not conceal anything and yet knows the magic word for the ‘glory of life’: its fullness in all its facets, whose shapes and colours she captures with a sure brushstroke. These pictures do our soul good. If we let ourselves be drawn into their mysterious magic, they give us a quiet hope.
Barbara Brockstedt M.A.
Vernissage: Thursday, 24th September 2020, 4 – 9 pm
Exhibiiton period: Satuday, 24th September to Tuesday, 10th November 2020
To the Gallery
Exhibition Natascha Ungeheuer – Galerie Brockstedt | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
