Over in Copenhagen this weekend, James Ulmer is opening a brand new solo present, Conditions, with the great folks of V1 Gallery of their V1 Salon.
Ulmer attracts inspiration from contrasting sources – from graphic novels, youngsters’s toys, and business illustration, to Western artwork historical past, he joins a continuum of artists for whom portray is an train mediated by visualities reaching far past its legacy. Certainly, his works evoke one thing akin to the frames of a comic book strip, every revealing a small, self-contained narrative populated with brightly colored, one-dimensional people in on a regular basis scenes, jogging within the park, sitting by the dinner desk, or gazing out the window. Devoid of facial features and hovering amidst flat, graphical blocks of shade, Ulmer’s topics are purposefully generic – they appear to exist someplace between the straightforward legibility of a highway signal and the stylised, cultic symbolism of historical artwork. Figurative portray’s historic function of chronicling quotidian life nonetheless rings true for the artist, but straddling the center floor between the instantly decipherable and the extremely enigmatic permits him to complicate notion and introduce a surreal and unsettling undercurrent.
