Gallery Luisotti will present three critical series of photographs by German artist Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, born 1938, Berlin. This will be a presentation organized in the artist’s thematic mode of hanging. She moves between clusters and lines of photographs based upon whether the project is temporally or topographically motivated.
The best-known work is her series Bus Stops (1997–2011) from Armenia. The series depicts derelict bus stops built during the late Soviet era of the 70s and 80s. Their attempts at modernist forms convey austerity but also a provincial charm. The earliest examples of this series will be on view in a compelling and dynamic arrangement. The next group from Sonnenstand (1991) tracks the movement of the sun via a sunbeam that pierces the inner sanctum of a 10th-century monastery in Huesca, Spain. The last time this series was on view in the US was in the mid-90s at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Finally, five works from 1980, Mesopotamia, Iraq, give a sense of the long-term historical formations and themes on which Schulz-Dornburg has focused. Multiple views of an ancient mounded “tell” hint at the ways history and civilization accumulate. Although her manner of display, photographs as typology, follows the style set by the Bechers in Dusseldorf, her education was grounded in the New Objectivity-inspired formalism promoted by Otto Steinert in Essen. Her two-person exhibition at Tate Modern in 2012 spurred renewed interest in her work, but it is with this presentation that an international audience can look anew in the considered context Frieze New York provides.
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