ART CITIES:Los Angeles -Ulrich Wüst
Ulrich Wüst is considered to be one of the most important photographers of the German Democratic Republic. Trained as an urban planner at the University College of Architecture and Civil Engineering in Weimar, Germany, Wüst took up photography in the ‘70s as a rhetorical tool for studying the development of cities. Throughout the ‘80s, his work evolved into an examination of life in the Socialist State.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Christopher Grimes Gallery
In “Stadtbilder/Nachlass”, the first solo exhibition of Ulrich Wüst at a U.S.A. Gallery that is on presentation at Christopher Grimes in Santa Monica presents two series of his photos. Ulrich Wüst studied at the Bauhaus University College of Architecture and Civil Engineering in Weimar from 1967 to 1972. He moved to East Berlin in 1972, where he worked as an urban planner up to 1977 and as a picture editor up to 1983. He began working as a freelance photographer in 1984. In the mid-1980s, he was one of the most important photographers in East Germany. In the “Stadtbilder“ series, Wüst photographed East German cities that were slow to recover from wartime destruction, bringing emphasis to the massive, soulless housing structures that emerged in the rise of the Socialist regime and that failed to address the rehabilitation of the cities’ historic city centers. As Wüst says “I wanted to create a landscape of the soul, drawing attention to what we had done to ourselves with our city planning”. Wüst remained in East Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall, where he began photographing left behind objects from the homes of those who abruptly fled the city. In the photographs from the “Nachlass” series Wüst captured the intimate architecture of everyday life, creating the objects’ historical portraits, and ultimately a portrait of their former owner, before they were disposed of and forgotten. As Ulrich Wüst was one of just a few artists who created an East German photographic identity, his work raises questions about art practice in an authoritarian state. East German art practice was subject to tight government control, which limited the diversity of public exhibitions, and Ulrich Wüst was constantly moving in and out of official culture. He was always exploring and pushing boundaries, and, as is often the case for artists, this led to trouble, scandals, and censorship under prevailing, in part grotesque regulations. His works were rarely shown outside East Germany prior to reunification. East German artistic production and photography in particular was long judged only by its own standards, but today it is viewed in a larger historical and international context.
Info: Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Avenue, Santa Monica, Duration: 6/5-17/6/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, www.cgrimes.com
