Wall Text for the Kunsthalle Schaffhausen
Dr. Thomas Hirsch, Düsseldorf

Ulrich Meister

Ulrich Meister is one of the significant artists of his generation. He has made unique, globally recognized contributions to conceptual art and is both a painter and draftsman as well as an artist with writing and text.

Drawing from his lifelong engagement with language and text—their typographic appearance and their ability to differentiate, as well as their poetic and musical qualities—and his visual sensitivity to the formal repertoire of objects in our civilization, which are shaped by functionality and design intent, he turns to their nature amidst the small events of everyday life. These include an open and a closed book, a pear and a cheese corner, a bottle and a swimming ring, among others. He brings to mind their formal characteristics and their complexity in nuance through language and line drawings, sometimes in connection with excerpts from supermarket brochures, with independent Polaroids, and finally also in paper cuttings and paintings, whose impetus is the representation of reality.

It is noteworthy that Ulrich Meister keeps his repertoire of objects limited and even returns to the same items repeatedly over decades. Through consistent, successive reduction towards the schematic and prototypical, he works out their "core." He is concerned with the essential, the fundamental, but also the complexity of the language of form and its beauty. In conversations, Ulrich Meister has emphasized that for him, functional use recedes into the background.

Ulrich Meister became internationally known in 1992 at the documenta in Kassel when he presented his "Text Objects": this is how he referred to his combinations of everyday objects and, hung on the wall beside them, individual sentences written or typed on a piece of paper, which focus purely on the contours of form and capture them in a thoughtful, meticulously observing manner, reinterpreting them in pictorial language. Object and text occur in parallel, touch each other, strive apart, and convey immense insights, oscillating between objectively factual characteristics and subjective appropriation of the world.

Over the years, Meister has made further concentrations. He extracts the typical and recognizably essential aspects of forms in their spatial arrangement, centering and isolating them simultaneously on the white picture surface. Furthermore, he has written on the image carrier—in the same typography—recording mundane events at home or in the studio, while also retaining and incorporating corrections. In this way, wonderful, profound linguistic miniatures have emerged.

Ulrich Meister's art teaches us to be attentive and to appreciate life with family and friends or at work with gentleness and serenity, paired with a gentle humor. Consequently, he was not concerned with grand gestures, neither in themes and subjects nor in format or ambition. Rather, he conveys uniqueness and love—on the path to happiness, which can ultimately only be discovered in the small things.

Ulrich Meister was born in 1947 in Schaffhausen; he grew up here and completed an apprenticeship as a typesetter in 1963. In 1967, he moved to Düsseldorf and enrolled at the local art academy the following year, studying in the class of Joseph Beuys. He lived in Düsseldorf until his death in August 2023. He was invited to exhibitions worldwide, including in the USA and Japan. In Switzerland, his exhibi