PARIS POP. ULRIKE OTTINGER

By awarding the Hannah-Höch-Preis 2011, offered by the State of Berlin’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the complex work of filmmaker and artist Ulrike Ottinger will be honored. At Neuer Berliner Kunstverein the unknown and previously unseen early oeuvre of Ottinger’s paintings (1963–68) will be shown on the occasion of this ceremony. While in recent years Ulrike Ottinger’s cinematic view is characterized by high ethnographic reflexivity, in her paintings and serigraphs some later icons of her early films are already developed. This yet unknown aspect of her oeuvre, till this day, proves relevant contemporaneity, which is in conflict with the present and past of post-Nazi societies as well as other cultures. In her idiosyncratic early work, inspired by pop art, her interest in the principle of collage/montage and the surreal/absurd already shows in the way it later recurs in the films.