Ulrike Stolte (*1980 in Rüdersdorf, Germany) earned her diploma in arts and graphic at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden/Germany in 2006 and then became alumni of Prof Ralf Kerbach. During her studies, she completed courses at art academies in Australia and London and received a scholarship at the renowned Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in 2005. Stolte lives and works in Berlin and regularly participates in international group exhibitions and art fairs.
Accumulations, disorder and chaos of forms, colors, patterns and lines are the force and motivation that compel my artistic production. Through the use of targeted interventions I fuse these aspects into orderly, harmonious and energized structures wherein citations from the fields of biology, music, fashion, culture and print media can likewise easily make an appearance. My scope of experimentation extends from painterly and graphically infused fabric collages to environmentally enveloping textile corpuses and installations.
The heart of this exploration is the textile itself. In particular: woven fabric as an article of daily use which, in its functional and aesthetic forms, surrounds us in excess. It is the bearer of a seemingly infinite array of colors, structures, ornamentation and patterns – as well as an indicator of origin, history and culture. In terms of its exploitation, fabric can be saliently combined and melded, and in my view also possesses something vibrantly alive that is comparable to painted skin.
My artistic approach is determined by the desire to take the textile material as an industrially manufactured, mass-produced commodity and dissolve it into a personal and distinctive world far removed from any form of cliché. The prevailing precept of this evolution is to engage with the given and to transmute it into a new context through targeted modification.
The point of departure for the mixed-media pieces is the collected fabrics that I sew together into a collage prior to stretching them on canvas frames. This raw concentration of forms, patterns, ornamentation, colors and structures is the foundation of my pictorial work. The surface is subsequently layered with fields of color and organic contours, usually appropriated from the world of flora and fauna. These superimpositions enable the individual areas to dissolve into further smaller units which, step-by-step, are in turn elaborated from the pictorial surface into new groups of forms. The resulting harmonious language of forms that develops is strongly influenced by the rhythm of the ornamentation, the tone of the colors, and the interlinking of the drawn lines. Divorced from the rigidity of the stretcher frames, unfettered installations of fabric and wool result.
The objective of my artistic production is to unlock inherent approaches to identifiable worlds within which the given individual can discern new inventions and discoveries based upon his or her own wealth of creativity and experience.