ULRIKE LUDWIG | res extensa

Opening: Friday, 6 May 2011, 7 p.m.
Exhibition: 7 May - 4 June 2011
 
We are pleased to invite you to attend the third solo exhibition by Ulrike Ludwig at the Loris Gallery. Following her series of empty interior spaces, cupboards, drawers and boxes, Ulrike Ludwig turns to the world of things in her new work, which is entitled »res extensa«. 

In this three-part work Ludwig first of all gives a glimpse of a library store-room. Unlike in her earlier work, this room is not empty. It is lined with bookshelves, which in turn represent systems of order and are containers for other things. 

The second part brings us closer to the shelves and picks out fifty magazines as an example. There is no sign, however, of a system of ordering according to subject matter, with the result that academic journals are found next to city and hobby magazines. Ludwig arranges the pictures into a wall-sized tableau, proceeding in a similarly unsystematic way. In the third section, the artist brings herself into play. She shows a page from the Sixth Meditation of Descartes with a passage she has marked, thereby examining her own physicalness. 

Ulrike Ludwig refers to René Descartes with the title »res extensa« and the text passage, and points to an epistemological approach that goes beyond the thing as a human sign. Hence the library magazines are not personal property that suggests the owner and bears autobiographical traits, but instead are common property. On the contrary, Ludwig interprets the thing (in this case the magazine) as an object of perception or as something standing opposite her, and explores her own positioning in terms of thing and space.

Go back