September 4, 2024–July 6, 2025
The Bass Museum of Art
Ulla von Brandenburg, the German-born artist based in Paris, engages with idiosyncratic moments and overlooked figures from the histories of art and culture. Her exhibitions and projects draw a wide range of subjects, including occultism, psychoanalysis, modernist architecture and Hollywood cinema, into contemporary contexts.
Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue is a presentation of von Brandenburg’s work paired with The Bass’s recently acquired ceramic mural by the Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan (1925–2021). A leading figure in contemporary Arab American visual art and literature, Adnan created rich, geometric fields of color in her paintings and drawings, some translated into large-scale murals and tapestries that reflect the artist’s enduring interest in architecture and the built environment. Comparatively, von Brandenburg’s multifaceted practice combines film, textiles, drawings, watercolors and sound into immersive exhibition scenarios where the different art forms harmonize into a cohesive whole (or Gesamtkunstwerk).
Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue explores this cross-generational engagement with geometric abstraction—its interplay of circles, squares and triangles—evident in both Adnan’s mural and von Brandenburg’s practice, and staged alongside the rich history of the Russian-French artist Sonia Delaunay. Here, Adnan’s lyrical abstract mural (Untitled, 2023), at 14 × 21 feet, serves as both a protagonist and theatrical backdrop in von Brandenburg’s exhibition scenography. The works interweave through the language of abstraction and the artists’ shared interests in the social and spatial environment.
