Leah Harmuth: Jens Ullrich, Contemporary Fine Artist

Jens Ullrich, German contemporary artist, creates collages taken from photographs of great sports moments plucked from newspapers.

His recent series, called Pilots, combines elements of classical sculpture and contemporary images of athletes in motion. Ullrich’s most recent work is on view at NADA New York.
Jens Ullrich takes carefully aligned, gracefully carved stone images of figures from antiquity and matches them with contemporary athletes, wryly suspending time and space.

As Ullrich states from the website, flavorwire, “Because I love figurative sculpture, I forced them into symbolic reparations, by hustling their divided bodies into new action and by violating their authorship, so that free spirit, which is known to fly like a dove, can finally take possession of them.”

Preserving a fleeting moment forever by contrasting athletic liveliness with the inflexible static, chiseled quality of time-worn statues, Ullrich’s colleges comment on the ephemeral nature of youth.
Jens Ullrich images are courtesy of Daniela Steinfeld, VAN HORN GALLERY, Dusseldorf, Germany.