GERMAN

Introduction to the Internet Exhibition of the SURREALIST Helmut Ullrich

The SURREALISM would probably have led without DADA and the psychoanalysis Sigmund Freuds not to the world-wide significance. 

 Helmut Ullrich, the inventor of the  the Menetekelism  as well as one the most important German SURREALIST apart from Max Ernst, Edgar Ende, Richard Oelze and Mac Zimmermann presented his works in this Internet Exhibition.  

The dadaists Tsara and Picabia came 1919 to of Paris, where the straight poet Andre Breton with Aragon and Soupault had created the magazine „Litterature ", Max Ernst followed 1922.  Due to internal discords the DADA circle dissolved.  One united again:  In addition the poets Andre Breton, Eluard, Aragon as well as further writers, and the painters Picabia, belonged Max Ernst, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.   

Siegfried Broese, president of the art association Freiburg

 "Once a verismo group of paintings, at which the pictures are painted in old-masterly meticulousness.  With these work the figures (objects), added into the picture connection, inserted into a perspective designed image space according to the rules of the central perspective, the colour perspective and the air perspective.  The objects are given bodyful modelled, the forms of the things are often monstrous, and it also with the brush and the color order a alteration, which sometimes appear the thing strange, thus differently than in nature to appear produced leaves.  Ullrich lasiert the pictures very carefully, often lays on top of each other it forty and more dye films.  Some of the pictures under-paints Ullrich first grey.  Thus it reaches the artist that the colors shine mysteriously as from a deep reason.  This enigmatically strengthened by a tremendously careful staggering of the transitions.  Beyond that the musical value of the colors in their relationship is balanced to each other to harmonies or dissonances, ever after it requires the picture statement.  In summary is said:  Ullrich uses infinite effort and care on each picture, on which he often works many months partially also years!  If one compares with it the roughly painted surfaces, which offer the American painters today to old Europe as works of art and with the iIdiotic and also at high prices sell validity craze of the establishment public, one asks oneself again and again in satisfying:  why do we believe that the Americans are better artists as our creative humans?  Did we become too tired?  Ullrich paints from the imagination, not from a vision.  Those the pictures given title do not call a topic, which the artist wants to turn on himself before considered and then in the mark act.  Ullrich says, the titles follows to the pictures, the pictures gives oneself its titles.   

The other group of its pictures shows such, calls we it naturalistic area.  The area of the second sort is the picture of a vegetative principle, it is actually the picture of an area, which grants its appearance to the things only.  This area is full secrets, he west and weaves and floats, it proceeds and decreases/goes back.  And the objects of the imagination get something supernatural, SURREALISMS by it. 

Also in the pictures Helmut Ullrich plays that all surrealists own feeling of the threat of humans by not understandable powers a large role.  Stranger and partially unreal things are each other assigned each other in the pictures in an area, whose sinister has first something oppressing.  If the viewer sinks himself then however into the thought connection of the picture, then the disconcertingly flies, dissolves. 

 The SURREALISM of Ullrich has another character than that the first and second generation:  They are not logic dreams or visions, but imagitative allegories of the uncanny ness and enigmatically of the world connection all being ends, also humans.  Their secret solves the viewer, if it is received into the picture to be able to formulate logical conceptual without coming however there, the experienced.  Ullrichs SURREALISM is a parable SURREALISM.  Any more revolt, like in the first years are not sense and a goal of this surrealistic painting, but all senses keep always awake for the uncanny ness of our world, from which are awake openness then the possibility of an evolution from the reason, arises into a new human world". 

 Dr. Jacob Reisner, art historian,

wrote in the introduction for art exhibition   Helmut Ullrich and FRANZ RADZIWILL 1895-1983 (Franz Radziwill is considered an important painter of the Neue Sachlichkeit, he is the Tachist at the first hour) which in the gallery Heseler, Munich, took place:  "The SURREALISM still lives in the forming art, in the literature and in the film from its original trunks and in always new, strong impulses.  One can understand oneself today only heavily the enthusiasm, which after the First World War in France a part the modern artist shank seized, as them in the gospel of the SURREALISM the creation of a new, marvellous WORLD FROM the DREAM to the heart was put.  Andre Breton, 1924 its first "communist manifesto of the SURREALISM" (1929 a second) published and by the power of its worthy-serious personality as Prophet, when highest judge, when "Pope of the SURREALISM" functioned.   

Success Bretons and its surrealistic teachings is not conceivable without the preliminary work of the DADAISTEN, which made themselves still during the First World War to a true full never-ending task:  to the radical dismantling of the conventional reason, moral and view of art.  At the same time an ingenious loner, Giorgio de Chirico, broke through the wall of the conventional picture conception.  Its "Pittura Metafisica" anticipates crucial courses of the later SURREALISM in its soberly realistic painting of disconcerting dream faces.  Few years before the SURREALISTics went for the article in the picture into Germany also the painters of the "new realism" to the work providing in prevention of the expressionism and abstract view of art again right.  In order to implement this right, they increased traditional realism to the as it were verism and the purchase of the represented things to magically quiet, often uncanny expression. 

 The SURREALISM artists dives into the labyrinth reasons of the subconscious and lifts things to the light, which normal humans know similarly from own dream experience, in its from reason, moral and other conventions certain lives however to the indistinct edges of consciousness moves rapidly again displaced or.  The SURREALIST however places it in its works often in sharpness, as real before eyes.  Dream range and external world are considered to it as equal.  In addition, this external world proves from a certain point of view as surreal.  If both ranges - dream face and fantastic external world - in the spirit of the artist step into one another, then that multilayered, enigmatically SURREALISM results, how HELMUT ULLRICH before us spreads it.  In its work besides a crucial transformation of the new German SURREALISM becomes visible:  Main topic is not any more the representation of the intimate, private dream sphere, but the collective fear dream of a existence-threatened man sort.  Formally seen, the SURREALISM shows many faces.  More importantly than each classification the effort is around insight into the respective artistic special sort.  In the works of Max Ernst, Andre Masson, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy and other important SURREALIST artits step all possible style forms and techniques, taken over and invented, old-masterly and modern, into feature and realize the conceptions and dreams of the artists of the miracles, peculiarities and frights of our world". 

 Dr. Richard Hiepe, art historian, article of TENDENCIES:  Publishing house F. von Damnitz, Munich, Sept.  1961, NR.  10. 

"The large old men proved it;  in the broken eye of the dreamer the truth is reflected often more sharply than in the together-pinched observer.  When Max painted Ernst 1941 its „Europe from the rain ", it saw it already disintegrating as washed, disturb landscape of devastation, suffocated at the own abundance and.  It forestalled the death pastures of the bomb carpets and Atom atolls pictorial, like Dali with its „fluent "clocks, the scientifically soft terms of space, time and reliability.  If today a younger SURREALIST, light courage HELMUT ULLRICH, lets a gigantic Ikarus crack Munich, like a bomb in the house, then that becomes crazy person the frightening fact, which one does not remember only gladly." 

The surrealism is presence, past and future. The pictures the surrealists, Helmut Ullrich, are to how before HIGH-TOPICAL, the events in this time and in the last years this could confirm. Defiance of the infernos in Ullrichs pictures finishes all into highest poetry.  Hans Terwege  

back