Familiar foreign places

House facades, interiors, park landscapes – the motifs of the Freiburg and Berlin-based painter Ulrike Gerst are all man-made, yet she always shows them devoid of people. And something else is missing: the pictures always show only a small section, a certain perspective, a very specific view, while the larger context is excluded from the pictorial space and thus handed over to the imagination of the viewer. Any attempt to read the frame of reference from the image inevitably ends in contradictions. The scenes, in slightly faded colours, look like distant memories of times gone by, but at the same time the absent people seem to have just left the place, the traces of their activities are still visible, the tables are freshly decorated with flowers and the curtain is blowing in a light breeze at the wide-open window.

The places in the pictures seem strangely familiar and yet, in some undefined way, alien.  They are observations of our everyday reality as we know it, so skilfully chosen that it is easy to relate to them, one can almost hear the rattling of the twisted blinds or smell the linoleum floor. And yet there remains a distance, an invisible veil between the viewer and the silent events that cannot be grasped. In a remarkable way, Gerst manages to combine vivid reflections, light and movement with a highly reduced representation. This gives her paintings an almost graphic quality, perhaps showing the idea of a place rather than the place itself, a space as pars pro toto, a game with our expectations, inviting us to fill in the scenes with our own memories.

More about the artist: Ulrike Gerst's artist page