‘The times of creative markings of the ego are history; after the numerous deaths of the panel painting, a healthy scepticism prevails in painting, a respect for the white canvas. Stubenböck breaks away from the sober positions of Radical Painting, the purists and ascetics of the monochrome canvas - from Ryman, Hafif to Umberg - and fills the pictorial field with temperature, spirit and openness.’ (Florian Steininger)
Ulrike Stubenböck's concept of painting is consistent and stringent. She devotes herself analytically to the medium of painting and produces the panel painting in a systematic concept that allows for painterly openness despite control. In the sense of a serial approach, Stubenböck dedicates each of her series to different colour tones. These are applied to the primed canvas: previously many different colours, today almost only three. Using a palette knife, the artist mixes these layers of colour in an almost meditative movement. From top left to bottom right, the layers are mixed into one another, emerge in different ways, fade away or glow in a previously indeterminable colour. Chance is just as much a part of these works as failure. Each work only gets one chance. If the result does not work - if one stroke is too few or too many - there is no correction, the picture is lost.
The exhibition ‘time and again’ shows works from the last 17 years. Visitors can recognise the development of Ulrike Stubenböck's work. The oldest picture in the exhibition, ‘Loch 1’ from 1997, shows an abstract, painterly background that has been blurred over with traces of palette knife in its lower left corner. Here the personal brushstroke is still clearly legible, the implication of the abstract gestural still present. This is followed by the Inner Series from around the turn of the millennium, in which several colours are mixed and which clearly reveal the reference to nature: a water lily pond with a hint of colour on the one hand or a pink sky above a snow-covered mountain meadow on the other. Stubenböck draws narrow gestural traces here. In the further development, the colour is reduced, the trace of the palette knife becomes broader, more deliberate, even more horizontal. Ulrike Stubenböck moves ever closer to a radical solution, even when she reduces the format to a square. This format is detached from any association of horizon or figure.
In the Hammershøi Series, for example, the painter even reduces the colours to the palette used by the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi around 1900. ‘I am deeply convinced that the fewer colours a picture has, the better the effect it has in the colour sense.’ (Vilhelm Hammershoi). The two most recent pictures in the exhibition - 2014 - now deviate from the square format to landscape format. Originating from the Ochroid Series, they each have only three primary colours, which are processed with wide palette knives and result in a calm, atmospheric blurring.