WOLFRAM ULLRICH GAP, 2022 

Corten, wood, charcoal on paper, various sizes

Courtesy Dep Art Gallery, Milan 

Among the most representative exponents of "object-painting", Wolfram Ullrich (Würzburg, Germany, 1961. Lives and works in Stuttgart) moves between painting and sculpture, expanding his compositions into the surrounding space and challenging our perceptual abilities.
Painting characterized by a sculptural attitude or, vice versa, sculpture with painterly leanings, his art is one and the other together, expanding with concrete volume but adopting color as its surface. In both cases, emptiness assumes a fundamental value, it is an equal and synergistic element of the composition, to be compressed or expanded. His works, always composed of several elements, impose themselves as positive forms while the surrounding space constitutes the negative that accommodates and defines them. At Exchiesetta, the artist presents a new production entitled Gap, a word that indicates precisely the void that delimits and determines his works. The installation consists of three iron elements, identical in form but differently oriented.
Apparently very heavy components, whose gravity, however, is perceptually emptied by the slender branches that hold them up. Moreover, not steel or polished iron forms them, but corten, alluding to an interaction with the environment, which no longer merely surrounds or traverses but goes so far as to bring about a physical change in the work.
The void, or rather what we perceive as such even though it is not, is an active part by interacting with the works to the point of transforming them. This is a specific homage of the artist to the Apulian territory. Ullrich, in fact, partially deviates for once from the rigor of constructivist-derived geometry to launch into a real interaction with nature and the exhibition context. The installation, formerly located in an ancient trullo site in the countryside of Ceglie Messapica, the summer venue of Milan's Dep Art Gallery, which represents the artist in Italy, is now re-proposed in Polignano in an expanded form, also including the Window sculpture and two works on paper from the same cycle, dated 1995, long-standing testimonies of such reflections by the artist. Works conceived specifically for a minimal architecture such as the Apulian trullo but also the small medieval church of Santo Stefano, which with its cubic compartment accommodates houses the sculptures in a dynamic at once spatial and perceptual. 

Carmelo Cipriani