Ulrich Meister at the Pavilion

“Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in a talk once made the following statement: “I have often compared architecture with language. Because one has to master the grammar to express oneself clearly. Then one can say everyday things, logical things and –if one is a poet– even artistic things.”

In the same interview he continued to talk about the importance of drawing. He considered it essential for each architect to acquire first of all the necessary experience and skill. By starting with learning how to sharpen your pencil, considering the making of a good pencil-point as an act of craft, an act of understanding, only then are you able to start making a precise drawing. In his opinion you first had to learn to draw a line correctly, sensing the difference between various line-weights and experiencing how this feels in your hand.

For Mies drawing was the first step to deal with a problem clearly and logically.

In the recent works of Ulrich Meister, we discover a lot of the same preoccupations. Although he is neither a pupil of Mies van der Rohe, nor an architect, his realisations concern the same essential themes. Language for example plays a prominent role in almost all of his creations. And recently, he started to produce a body of works, inspired by an obsessive analysis of the drawing technique.

For his exhibition in the Barcelona Pavilion, however, he decided to use a wider range of media, presenting paintings, strict one-line drawings, polaroids and illustrations he takes from supermarket-flyers and simply pins to the wall.

But all these works have one basic thing in common: they all are directly related to our everyday reality.

Obessively, Ulrich Meister refers to the banal and the common as source for his art. Like Marcel Duchamp he demonstrates to us again and again his love and admiration for the small, ordinary objects that surround us. As if he were reinventing the device of the ready-made, his strategies transform very normal, not outstanding, even boring objects into the protagonists of his art.”

Piece of the article titled “A sharpened pencil” by Hilde Teerlinck, curator of the exhibition.

Ulrich Meister (1947–) is a Swiss, post-war and contemporary artist. His work caused a first stir at the 1992 Documenta. He combined unassuming everyday objects with typewritten texts on standard A4 paper. In one example, a discarded plastic bag was placed next to the naive observation that something could only develop its true beauty after it had been used. Meister takes inconspicuous everyday objects—such as a bag of potatoes or a clothes hanger on a drying rack—and combines them with succinct, poetic characterizations that take them far beyond their functional contexts. Ulrich Meister has developed an extensive artistic vocabulary. He creates art in several different media parallel to one another. One might even say that each of Meister’s different media is stimulated by the others, and that none of them could exist without the others. Ulrich Meister has, as it were, created his own universe.