Ulrike Theusner - New York Diaries - Malerei und Papierarbeiten

We warmly invite you and your friends to the opening on Saturday, October 19, from 2 to 4 PM!

The artist will be present.

A catalog will be published for the exhibition.

New York often feels like a slowly crumbling city to me. In the third installment of the New York Diaries, the sense of an impending apocalypse creeps in, as if the city is conjuring its own demise at every corner. In 1929, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca described a similar sensation in his “Dance of Death”:

Cobras shall kiss on the top floors.

Nettles shall shake courtyards and terraces.

The stock Exchange shall become a pyramid of moss.

Jungle Vines shall come behind the rifles.

And all so quickly, so very, very quickly.

Every time, the city puts me in a state of nervous excitement. I am captivated by the intense rhythm and fast pace of New York, breathless and ultimately exhausted by the never-ending sensory overload. I almost live like one of those squeaking subway rats: I sleep on cold spring days and am awake during the purple nights. The city feels to me like a cumbersome, wonderful, megalomaniacal monster—a festering sore where poverty and wealth, pleasure, envy, melancholy, and superficiality coexist closely. It chooses whom to grant happiness or suffering, who is favored and who is deemed unnecessary, who gets spat out from its great maw....

My continuation of the New York Diaries from 2009 to 2012 is based on diary entries, numerous photographs, and many pencil sketches created in New York between January and June 2013. From these sketches, a cycle of 40 ink drawings developed.

Ulrike Theusner

New opening hours:
Wednesdays 11 AM - 7 PM and by appointment

Image: Ulrike Theusner, The Triumph, 2013, ink on paper, 70 x 50 cm