Ulf Puder belongs to the first generation of graduates of the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts and was part of a new movement, die Leipziger Schule, whose visual language is characterized by both a strong narrative quality and mastery of the brush. Powder’s work has influenced a generation of younger painters throughout Europe for many years.

A secret for the fascination that emanates from Puder’s artworks is based on a pictorial concept of conscious unstagedness, i.e. a pictorial language that is as simple and natural as possible. For his paintings, Puder uses the stylistic elements of ancient rhetoric – the concealment of art. The difficulties of creative activity fade into the background in his pictures in favor of grace and nonchalance. The intellectual framework here consists of weighing the trivial against the special event. The real art is therefore to hide the art.

Puder’s paintings, reduced to essential elements, tell of an imaginary future, subtly dystopian, with architectural landscapes free of human presence. They possess a unique charisma that arises from the tension between silence and chaos, idyll and apocalypse, but also between abstraction and figuration. Familiar and yet confusing, calm and yet disquieting, these „elegies of modern society“ draw us into their spell.

With his paintings of cultural landscapes, the artist from Leipzig stands in the tradition of European and, in its wake, American landscape painting. This is not only impressively reflected in his style, motif and title. It’s also visible in terms of content. Like his historical forerunners, he illustrates with his paintings the exciting meeting of culture and nature – albeit with his very own signature.

Ulf Puder (1958, Leipzig, Germany) is represented worldwide in important public and private collections and exhibited in renowned institutions. His works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions at the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg (DE), Stadtmuseum Oldenburg (DE), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (SE), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (DE), Museum Ludwig, Budapest (HU), in the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York (US), in the Camden Art Centre, London (UK), in the Museum de Paviljoens Almere (NL), in the Kunsthaus Dresden (DE), in the Museo Municipal de Malaga (ES) as well as in numerous galleries in Europe and the United States. Ulf Puder, a master student of Prof. Bernhard Heisig, lives and works in Leipzig.