Art Forum - summer 2006
Jessica Morgan on Ulla von Brandenburg
Unlike many artists today who scavenge from every last scrap of modernist production, Ulla von Brandenburg has leaped over that period of utopian experimentalis, alight instead in the preceding century. Von Brandenburg is attracted to the sophistication, escapism, extreme aestheticism, world-weariness, and fashionable despair that characterized the literary and artistic climateof the European fin de siècle (though in practice she looks equally to German Romanticism and the baroque metaphor of the theatrum mondi). Rather than longing for ideological absolutes, the apparent impetus for the ongoing investigation of modernism, von Brandenburg is drawn to the sense of uncertainty associated with this previous moment’s expectation (rather than the actuality) of change, and how this anxiety manifested itself.
