Uta Weber

The objects and installations by Uta Weber radiate vitality and joy of colour. With the exhibition title “Plastic”, Weber refers to the material she works with and to the genre of fine art to which her works belong. Weber deliberately plays with the ambiguity of this word.

Her works are mostly reduced to simple, geometric, often round forms. Through the special choice of materials, Uta Weber gives the colours a special effect: the light is either reflected or shines through the objects. The colour effect is thus further intensified. The surfaces are smooth and show hardly any traces of processing.

The artist creates an interplay of form, colour, material and surface; it is a joyful use of geometric shapes with references to everyday life. Consumer goods such as sweets, patisserie and jewelry, pop culture objects and songs (e.g. “Lady Bump”) as well as product design are often the starting point of her work.

Uta Weber was born in the western German industrial city of Leverkusen in 1966 and grew up looking at the world’s largest neon sign, the Bayer Cross. Her childhood and youth were shaped by the modernity and bustle of this industrial city with its concrete landscapes and brightly coloured facade cladding. It was also a time of new, then innovative consumer products: instant products from Dr. Oetker and Pfanni, artificial smells from Kaloderma, Delial, Odol and Schauma, colourful plastic packaging, colourful product designs and new synthetic fabrics.

With her language of colour and form, Uta Weber brings the iconography of the 1960s and 1970s, i.e. her childhood and youth, into the present and fuses abstract art with pop art. Her objects draw their power from the ambiguity, the mixture of the components. The reference to the geometric abstraction, the nature and effect of the unusual materials and the allusion to the world of consumer goods and product aesthetics that we are all familiar with give Weber’s work its great presence and topicality.

Opening
Wednesday, 1 February 2023, 6 – 8pm