Ulf Puder: Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago, IL, 60607

Kavi Gupta is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of the Leipzig-based painter Ulf Puder. Ulf Puder’s latest series of paintings describes the artist’s unique imaginary world of desolate and haunting environments populated only by abandoned architecture and rendered in his signature muted palette. Tents, mobile homes, churches, train cars and other recreational spaces that should be occupied are left emptied and silent. Bungalows float on makeshift platforms within flooded streets; other structures seem to be in the midst of a storm. Natural disasters come to mind - places that have recently seen the unthinkable and have been left uninhabitable.

Verwerfung (Rejection, 2008) depicts what reads as a church flanked by an elevated roadway that has been split in half – a locomotive wagon is seen above looming over the edge. The imagery spells out a horrifying scenario, though the artist paints the seen teetering from abstraction to representation. The space is beautiful, the sky is blue without evidence of what has occurred or perhaps in this case what is about to occur. When one encounters another image in the exhibition titled Hub the structures collapse even further re-emphasizing the ongoing decay and fragility of these enigmatic places.

Ulf Puder was born in Leipzig, 1958 where he currently lives and works. Puder belongs to the first tier of famous graduates from the Leipziger Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Visual Arts) and along with his peer, Neo Rauch, he was on the forefront of painters creating a new vocabulary that combined the neo-realism prevalent in the former Eastern Germany with a surrealistic bent. Ulf Puder has had solo exhibitions at Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Dogenhaus Galerie Leipzig, and Torch Gallery, Amsterdam. He has also been included in group exhibitions including Future Tense at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; Archipeinture at Le Plateau, Paris and at the Camden Art Centre, London; The Painter of Modern Life, Museum de Paviljoens, Almere, NL; Kunsthaus Dresden; Museo Municipal de Malaga; and New German Painting at the Prague Biennale 2.