Not only was Ulrike Rosenbach a pioneer of video art, integrating it into her installations and performances, but she was also one of the first artists—on the German and international scenes—to embrace the feminist cause in her work in the late 1960s. Unlike so many women artists of her generation, however, she did not let herself get bogged down in an often exhausting and lopsided struggle to assert feminist ideas. Her quest for an alternative social and cultural position for women led her to encounters with archaic and mythical ways of thinking that would change her perspective on herself and on nature—at a time when the relationship between nature and humanity was not yet a widely recognized concern in art. This transformation was also propelled by her in-depth studies of non-European and, in particular, Asian traditions that enabled her to consider her own European identity from a distance. Again, this was at a moment in which art audiences and even critics weren’t necessarily familiar with postcolonial approaches. As a result, her work was often misunderstood. But new interpretations of the artist’s work are beginning to catch on. The ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, is celebrating her eightieth birthday with a grand retrospective that opened in late June.
Meanwhile, Galerie Gisela Cle-ment in Bonn is presenting a selection of installations that exemplify the rich complexity of Rosenbach’s practice. One work abruptly confronts the beholder with an enormous black-and-white photomural of an ancient statue of Hercules, stark naked, with a pensive expression, supporting himself on a club as he flaunts his brawn. A small monitor is mounted to the wall over the crook of his left arm. It shows the artist herself in a color close-up. The camera lens approaches and withdraws from her face in a rhythmic motion, producing sometimes sharp, sometimes blurry images. Moving in the same rhythm, her lips keep mouthing the word Frau (woman). The ephemeral quality of the image on the screen and the single word, whispered so softly as to be almost inaudible, contrast sharply with the male body bursting with strength; its muscles look inflated, out of proportion, preposterous. This 1977 work, which was shown at Documenta 6 in Kassel, is titled Heracles—Hercules—King Kong.
Another work demonstrating Rosenbach’s interest in archaic and mythical subjects is Schmelzprozesse (Melting Processes), 1982/2023. It shows a powder-coated aluminum silhouette on the wall: the outline of a black angel from a fresco at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. Angels appear in her installations with regularity, as creatures that mediate the real world and the transcendent—genderless fleeting apparitions who serve as messengers and intercessors. Here, the angel is accompanied by a slow-motion video of the artist’s hands as she uses her fingers to form the outline of a heart. A bronze heart hangs from the ceiling by a yellow mourning band above marble powder scattered on the floor. Rosenbach melds the archaism of the angel and the then-new medium of video in a creation that is timeless. Such unions of the ancient and the technological are the hallmark of her work of the 1980s.
The installations are flanked by drawings, which the artist used as a kind of diary: gorgeous images filled with miracles—humans metamorphosing into trees and vice versa, the artist herself occasionally appearing in the guise of an angel. Rosenbach also never abandoned the quest for beauty, a pursuit that has sometimes garnered hostile reactions. Today, though, we are beginning to cherish it as what makes her art special.
Translated from German by Gerrit Jackson.
