Alfred Ullrich

Alfred Ullrich grew up in Vienna and now lives in Dachau Land. He is the son of a German and an Austrian Sintezza. As such, he feels like an outsider among outsiders. His diverse works revolve around the question of how (German) society relates to the Sinti and Roma. His experience: without provocation, it is difficult to get people to take a stand. So he forces the viewer to take a position in a provocative but always bitterly charming way. However, Ullrich not only tries to dissolve the prejudices of society that have been handed down for centuries and are stuck in the collective subconscious of society, to encourage people to think and do things differently, but he also processes his own family history: Alfred Ullrich's entire family was deported to concentration camps and most of them died there. His mother was in several camps and lost her parents, twelve siblings and her first son. She survived imprisonment, but the traumatisation also shaped her son Alfred: themes of pain, death and vulnerability are thus naturally part of his work.

Ullrich's growing up itself was "exotic" and seems to correspond perfectly to the cliché of the "funny gypsy life". He spent the first nine years of his life in a covered wagon on the northern outskirts of Vienna. After finishing school, he travelled all over Europe for three years until he finally landed in Munich in 1971, where he worked as a stagehand and in a workshop for manual printing processes. Ullrich's (print) works live in the delightful tension between the beautiful and the coarse, between grace and provocation. At first glance, his print art does not seem to be concerned with its origins; there he uses the means of printmaking in an experimental way and creates more abstract formations. He prefers dry point, a complicated technique that demands precision and concentration. The results are delicate, mostly abstract images that reveal the process of printing itself and dissolve the representational. A closer look at the works reveals his playfulness and reveals contradictions: the structures form a multifaceted surface on which forms and colours enter into conflicting interplays. The printed forms are traces of physical destruction of the printing plates, be it through etching or rolling of the plates themselves or, for example, through imprints of beer cans punctured in performative actions.

In order to set clear political signals, Alfred Ullrich no longer relied on his printing art alone, but increasingly appeared as an action artist. His first art action, which was recorded on video and in a photo documentation, is called PERLEN VOR DIE SÄUE and dates from 2001. In a picture taken in the course of the action, Ullrich is standing in front of a gate, beads falling from his open hand onto the ground. The place itself is not just any place: the site at whose entrance it stands was the Lety concentration camp. In 1994, the history of this camp and the murder of Roma and Sinti was published for the first time. The publication turned into a scandal because the camp served as a pig fattening farm. This action became Ullrich's contribution to the first Roma Pavilion in Venice in 2007; he documented the action PERLEN VOR DIE SÄUE photographically.

Alfred Ullrich is an alert observer and subtly and humorously questions traditional ways of seeing and behaving. Especially in language and images, he often finds a thoughtless discrimination of the exotic-foreign. In 2006, in TRANSIDENTIES, he denounced the conditions of the public toilets at the former Landfahrerplatz near Dachau: So Ullrich takes photos and shoots a video - and lo and behold, the toilets disappear overnight, leaving behind a porta-potty. Five years later, at his instigation, the sign with the inscription "Landfahrerplatz kein Gewerbe" also disappeared. Because "this word 'Landfahrer' was in use during the Nazi era and is a synonym for Gypsy, and we reject that as discriminatory. And then I tried to inform the city of Dachau about it. I didn't succeed right away in really getting a hearing there."

Alfred Ullrich is also represented with prints in the EDITION GALERIE KAI DIKHAS.