Ulrike Köppinger draws and paints from memory after her walks and hikes. These memories include the visual impressions as well as the inner processes, in favor of an abstraction that plays with dualities such as culture / nature, woman / man, human / animal, inside / outside, solid / liquid.
I go for a walk in Ulrike Köppinger‘s pictures: A landscape of colors and shapes lies in front of me, reminiscent of ferns, branches, mosses, light reflections in the foliage, clouds and paths. Interesting are the connections that arise between the raw canvas, which is usually only slightly primed, and the written, drawn symbols, painted, flowing forms of color and solid lines applied to it in oil, pigments, crayons, charcoal, pastel colors and pencil.
The use of the different materials makes me think of comment levels, like the pencil lines that mark a path between two color forms.
A triangle is added to a purple flickering area, or a dashed line of charcoal divides an image in half. Painting and drawing, much like taking a walk, can be a practice of reflection and I see this in the pictures. I see the rhythm, the interruptions, the fragments that are then reconnected, the intense color fields that dissolve at the edges, condense again in another place and are connected by large drawn semicircles. There are sketchy, interrupted and fragile, fine lines that are barely visible to intense patches of color that are more than just light, they are energy fields and this is exactly what these landscapes remind me of. It‘s about how the stream of thoughts you can indulge in while walking feels, how thinking feels when I go out into a landscape: interrupted, laborious, heavy, light, flowing, silly... And like body and mind interact with the environment. Ulrike Köppinger has found a language for this.
Jenni Tischer, Berlin November 2019