galleri HERVOLD Stavanger

Ulla Diedrichsen is one of the great contemporary Danish artists we have. Since the 70s, she has been investigating the field between words and images.

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Ulla Diedrichsen is a Danish contemporary artist with roots in international conceptual art and the European direction, Spurensicherung. She has a starting point in painting, but early on became one of the pioneers within Danish photo-based art and contemporary media. She shows this in her thematic exhibitions containing both painting, drawing, object art, film and photography. Ulla Diedrichsen already exhibited photographic installations and environments in the 1970s and has received several awards for this.

In the 1980s, she was selected by Polaroid to experiment with instant photography and became the first Danish artist included in The International Polaroid Collection, Boston, USA, together with artists such as Helmut Newton, Ansel Adams, Chuck Close and Andy Warhol. Like the latter, she also got the opportunity to develop Polaroid's 50/60 format. The result of this is included in the collections of several European museums, e.g. Kunstmuseum Brandts, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her Polaroid series "Shootings from The Factory" recorded in 1986 and 1987 at Andy Warhol's The Factory in NY is also well known.

In the 1990s, Diedrichsen was one of the first visual artists to work with integration between art and architecture, which took the form of 10 public Danish buildings, i.a. Fredericia Police Station and Skanderborg Health Center. Her collaboration with renowned architects resulted in a number of lectures, also lectures qua her external lectureship at the Department of Art History (1984-98), Aarhus University.

Alongside Ulla Diedrichsen's extensive exhibition business, i.a. as the first female Danish artist with a solo and retrospective exhibition at the ARoS Art Museum, she has collaborated with a number of international authors, including the Dadaist Vienna poet, Friederike Mayröcker, the feminist icon Erica Jong NY and the women's researcher Karin Wieland from Berlin. Recurring investigations in Diedrichsen's work are of an existential nature, which challenge established notions of identity and behaviour. She is a voyeur and shows why we do what we do, which is particularly evident in her photo series and texts, e.g. in the exhibitions and books BeautiFULL – my Combine Side at KØN – Gender Museum Denmark and Jeg-var-her, Skriftbilleder, Ribe Kunstmuseum.

In addition to the visual artistic practice and the architecture-integrated projects, she has curated several exhibitions, participated in a large number of TV and radio broadcasts, made films and contributed to book publications about her multifaceted work. Diedrichsen works internationally, has exhibited and is represented in art museums and collections both in Denmark and abroad. Several books and publications have been published about her work. She is included in the Literaturarchiv Salzburg and the Institut für Moderne Kunst, Nuremberg.

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