7 July to 10 July

Ausstellungsdauer 6. to 10. July 2022

Gallery Bentler, Bonn
Hall 1/A09

Event date: 7 - 10 July 2022


The fact that Bernard Schultze, along with Fred Thieler and Jaroslav Serpan, as an artist belonging to Informal Art, took part in the 7th Evening Exhibition in Düsseldorf on 24 April 1958, together with the Zero artists Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, makes the Informal Art of Bernard Schultze extremely attractive to many collectors, especially those of Zero Art.
Extremely attractive precisely because this art clearly shows us all what we so quickly forget: That we are so privileged to have lived in a country of freedom since 1949. Informel, which was "understood as a conscious opposition to the art dictatorship of the Nazi era.... was seen in the 1950s as an expression of the new political order. Rupprecht Geiger summed it up: "The world is crying out for renewal or ruin. "*.
And this "newness" is still evident in the works of art in the year 2020. Rupprecht Geiger's summary of this art is perhaps even more relevant and justified in its new meaning than it was seventy years ago.
Anyone who looks at the fantastic, bizarre pictorial worlds of Bernard Schultze, anyone who absorbs the colour world of this artist, will always recognise this desire for renewal, for himself and for our world. Even seventy years after the first eruption of Informel.
And so Bernard Schultze's one-artist show at the Bentler Gallery stand fits the times, as if Bernard Schultze had visionarily and extremely imaginatively anticipated our times.
The artist Ulrika Eller Rüter follows on seamlessly from this. She too deals with the theme of the urgently needed "renewal". As an artist of our time, she is, like all of us, intensely confronted with the existential threat to the living space "earth". And that is why she deals with this elementary theme in her works.
Since 2019, the artist has dedicated herself to the topic of water in the multimedia project "SEA LEVEL" in images, light staging and music. She draws water samples from seas, rivers, streams, ponds, springs, archives and microscopes them. In this way, she makes visible the hidden "images" that are concealed in every drop as the memory of water like codes and provide pictorial information about the influences of civilisation, the environment, the cosmos and the universe.
With the microscopies, Ulrika Eller-Rüter uses imaging methods such as those used in medicine and biology, and thus works in the border areas between art and natural science.
The artist shows the infinite creative possibilities of the formative power of water at art Karlsruhe in a One Artist Show at the stand of Galerie Bentler in her large-format picture series as fine art prints. The microscopes of the "drops" of water are designed as microcosms in their own right, appearing like internal organs or their own planetary systems. They float in "floods of colour" as picture backgrounds, which the artist has scooped up in real terms from colour baths in an hour-long dipping process. Great art combined with science creates food for thought here for the "renewal" of our world.
With the content-related aspects of their artworks, these two positions are intensely interwoven with the entire portfolio of the Bentler Gallery. With the Zero art of an Otto Piene, a Heinz Mack and a Günther Uecker, who changed an entire generation with their "search for light", and which in turn radiates to younger artists: Aja von Loeper, André Schweers and Bettina Hachmann. Here, by using the same stylistic devices, new content is generated, ranging from the vulnerability of our environment to the primal trust in life.
*Publication of the Kunsthalle Schweinfurt on the occasion of the exhibition Positions of German Informel

The programme of the Bentler Gallery is complemented and enriched by positions such as Markus Lüpertz, whose atlas again takes up the theme of "Preserving the Earth", Marius Singer, whose "Abstract Landscapes" are declarations of love to the diversity of our creation, Michael Cleff, whose unique ceramics simply make us feel absorbed in the here and now, and, last but not least, Sybille Pattscheck, whose translucent encaustic works convey so much joy in simply being part of this world through their luminosity.