Ulrich Erben unveils new 'color topographies" in 6th solo show at Bastian

Ulrich Erben’s earliest paintings were the nearly monochrome ›white paintings‹ executed around 1968, almost sixty years ago. They were dialogues in which the colour white and its affects gained a space of resonance. Yet they were not an act of devotion to a cool, totally isolated image, but rather a poetic sensuality of light, shadow and particles. Robert Rauschenberg once said of his white paintings, created in 1951 at Black Mountain College, without knowing the works of Malevich: »I tried to get as far away as possible from any image and yet to have an image.« If, for Robert Rauschenberg, it was urban life and the rejection of any nobility of materials that led to a new pictorial language, for Ulrich Erben it was his early stay in Italy that evoked the tangible physicality of the Mediterranean, the landscape of light and its metamorphoses, the symbolic resonance of colours and forms. Ulrich Erben once described these works as ›colours of memory‹ – that q