Ulrike Theusner

Ulrike Theusner is among the outstanding graduates of the Bauhaus University. The ivory tower in Weimar served as a perfect counterpart to her exciting side gig, which involved travel, shocks, and plenty of beautiful surfaces: the artist worked as a top model.

She walked the runway for Comme des Garçons, Vivienne Westwood, Hugo Boss, and Gucci, and graced the covers of fashion journals and lifestyle magazines. Her ironic distance from both worlds was notable—SZ Magazin chose her face for the cover of an issue about women who are too smart for certain men (13/2009).

The devastated and flooded New Orleans, the radioactive wilderness of the abandoned city of Pripyat, or New York's coked-up, cynical, bored bohemia are all motifs for the artist born in 1982. She paints and draws broken cities and people seemingly in passing, yet with a dreamlike precision.

Theusner's explorations of disasters are authentic, as what she depicts is drawn from her own experiences and observations.