Alba D'Urbano (born April 13, 1955) is a textile and video artist.
D'Urbano's most notable work was 1995's "hautnah" (close to the skin); a series of garments imprinted with life-size digital photographs of her own skin. [1] After an exhibition in 1999, critics stated she depicted nudity as fashionable, provoked voyeurism, and made skin (the external body) just another interface in a world. [2] [3] In addition to her own work, D'Urbano has been a critic and an art philosopher. Since 1995, D'Urbano has been a professor at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, in Leipzig, Germany.
D'Urbano was born in Tivoli and studied philosophy at the Sapienza University of Rome from 1974 to 1978. Her work as an artist was influenced by her affiliation with the 'Distracted Avantgarde' (Klemens Gruber), which sought to bring about a paradigm shift in the relationship between art, politics and mass communication. It was against this backdrop that Alba D'Urbano produced experimental radio programmes for the alternative broadcasting station Radio Gulliver in Tivoli (modelled on stations such as Radio Alice in Bologna and Radio Città Futura in Rome) and founded a feminist group. [4]
In 1979, she enrolled in a course of visual arts studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome under Enzo Brunori, graduating in 1983. Experimental works in collaboration with other artists date from that period. One such fellow artist was composer Alessandro Cipriani with whom she created performances, Super-8 films, and artistic events in public spaces. [5]
Alba D'Urbano moved to (West) Berlin in 1984 and began her studies in visual communication at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1985. In 1989, she graduated as a master student (Meisterschüler-Degree) in experimental film design under Wolfgang Ramsbott. In 1990 she held a scholarship at the Institute for New Media (INM) in Frankfurt am Main, headed by Peter Weibel. It was during that time that she met her future husband, Nicolas Reichelt. [6] [7]
After a lectureship at the Offenbach University of Art and Design (HfG), she was appointed to teach at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig in 1995, where she has since held a professorship in computer graphics, [8] and has taught the class for intermedia since 1998. [9] In 2003–2004, she taught at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano for one academic year. Since 2000, she has curated numerous exhibitions at the national and international level as part of her university duties, addressing political and social issues and incorporating both process-orientated and media-reflective methods.
In the 1980s, Alba D'Urbano's artistic interest focused on the drastic changes in the perception of reality brought about by the increasingly influential glut of virtual images, which are generated by the mass media and susceptible to manipulation. At the core of her artistic exploration was the relationship between the written word and the new media. Berlin's urban space with its partly truncated communication paths and its insular status provided the setting for her first video works from the series Nur die Augen können (filmed at Checkpoint Charlie, 1985) [10] and Kreis, der (filmed on Ernst-Reuter-Platz, 1987). For the video installations for the series Berlin Kulturstadt Europas, she focused on local communication media; in the series of paintings entitled Prometheus she addressed the impoverished human communications and the loss of writing.
In the 1990s, Alba D'Urbano turned to "interactive video and computer installations, to which her creative, complex, experimentally enhancing and problem-conscious approach gave significant impetus as a means of artistic impression". [11] In her projects, some of which featured a multiplicity of media (e.g. L'esposizione impraticabile, 1992, '96; [12] Rosa Binaria, 1993–96; [13] Hautnah [14] and Il sarto immortale, 1995–98) [15] she raised the viewer's awareness of mass media and their 'problematic nature without polemic and without affecting the aesthetic evocative force of various media' [Fußnote 2, Künstlerlexikon]. [11]
In a bid to counter an overwhelming array of media images, she began to toy with the viewer's expectations. She substituted images with illegible strings of characters and drew the viewer's attention towards the way in which media images are created and the processes they involve. She gained international renown through her multi-part projects Hautnah [16] and Il Sarto Immortale, [17] in which she digitally processed images of her own body and then had them printed onto fabric and transformed into items of clothing to be showcased by models on catwalks. In the interplay between clothing and nakedness, she literally exposed the commercial exploitation of women's bodies in the mass media and the fashion industry.
The works she developed jointly with Tina Bara are inspired by feminist standpoints: there, the body is portrayed as a matrix inscribed into which are identities as a cultural and social construct. For the two women artists, it is always about the process of allocating normative attitudes and behaviour patterns. In a series of intermedia projects such as Portrait Alba / Tina Ritratto and Bellissima the artists also referenced biographical material. A new added element incorporated by Tina Bara is the subject of the German Democratic Republic's past. The series of portraits entitled Siegerehrungen (2003) for instance features former elite GDR athletes. The project Covergirl: Wespen-Akte (2007-2009) looks at the opposition group Frauen für den Frieden , [18] of which Tina Bara is also a member.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
Neo Rauch is a German artist whose paintings mine the intersection of his personal history with the politics of industrial alienation. His work reflects the influence of socialist realism, and owes a debt to Surrealists Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte, although Rauch hesitates to align himself with surrealism. He studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, and he lives in Markkleeberg near Leipzig, Germany and works as the principal artist of the New Leipzig School. The artist is represented by Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin and David Zwirner, New York.
Klaus Peter Brehmer, was a German painter, graphic artist and filmmaker. From 1971 to 1997 he was professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg.
Inke Arns is a German curator and theorist known for her works focusing on media arts.
A Kunstgewerbeschule was a type of vocational arts school that existed in German-speaking countries from the mid-19th century. The term Werkkunstschule was also used for these schools. From the 1920s and after World War II, most of them either merged into universities or closed, although some continued until the 1970s.
Elke Rehder is a German artist living in Barsbüttel Germany.
Michael Riedel is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Frankfurt. His work operates at the interface between applied graphics and free art. Since 2017, he has been professor of painting/graphics at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig.
Werner Spies is a German art historian, journalist and exhibition organizer. From 1997 to 2000, he was a director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Klaus Albrecht Schröder, director of the Albertina in Vienna, has called Spies "one of the most influential art historians of the 20th century."
Hans-Michael Bock is a German film historian, filmmaker, translator and writer.
Tina Bara is a German photographer who began her career in the German Democratic Republic Her work was featured in several exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the Galerie Eigen + Art, Leipzig and the Kunsthalle Erfurt. In MutualArt’s artist press archive, Tina Bara is featured in Interference, a piece from the Revista Arta in 2020.
Angelika Platen is a German photographer known internationally for her portraits of artists.
Axel Krause, born 23 October 1958 in Halle (Saale), is a German painter and graphic artist. He is associated with the New Leipzig School and lives and works in Leipzig. He studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig in 1981–1986. He taught at the school in 1989–1999 and worked for the Leipzig Opera in 1990–1993.
Heinz Zander is a German painter, graphic artist, illustrator and writer. Zander belongs to the Leipzig School. His fields of work are painting (oil), drawing, graphics and illustration. He is also active as a writer and publishes novels, stories and essays. Zander worked with painting techniques oriented towards the Old Masters, from which he developed a completely independent pictorial language. He was inspired by Bosch, Grünewald, Altdorfer, Cranach and Italian Mannerists. He works mainly with colourful resin-oil glazes.
Bernhard Heisig was a German painter and graphic artist. Long-time director of the Leipzig Academy and a leading figure in East Germany's Leipzig School, which included Wolfgang Mattheuer and Werner Tübke, he painted in the tradition of Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and Oskar Kokoschka. His experiences from World War II on both the western and eastern fronts were a recurring subject in his art beginning in the late 1960s, and it is for these works that he is best known in the West. Highly regarded on both sides of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s, he was at the center of controversy after German unification when his painting Time and Life was selected to hang in the German parliament. The painting is a panorama of German history and hangs in the cafeteria on the first floor of the Reichstag building. The controversy was part of the larger German-German Bilderstreit over what role East German art and artists should be allowed to play in the new Germany.
Herlinde Koelbl is a German photographic artist, author and documentary filmer.
Beatrice von Bismarck is a German art historian, curator, author and professor for art history and Bildwissenschaft.
Gerhard Eichhorn was a German graphic artist, painter and draughtsman.
Abisag Tüllmann was a German photographer.
Karl Krug was a German painter.
Robert Suckale was a German art historian, medievalist and professor at the Technical University of Berlin.
Philippine Wolff-Arndt was a German painter. Despite difficult access to an artistic education, she was active in this profession throughout her life. She was also committed to socially disadvantaged people and campaigned for women's rights, for example as a co-founder of the Leipzig Women Artists' Association. In Leipzig, she also fought for the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig to be the first art academy in Germany to admit women to study.
