Ulf Puder

Ulf Puder (b. 1958, Leipzig, Germany) lives and works in Leipzig and Liemehna, Germany. Puder graduated in 1990 from the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB) Leipzig as a Meisterschüler of Prof. Bernhard Heisig. He, together with his peer Neo Rauch, have influenced an important generation of artists. For Puder, his work is central to many of the leading Leipzig painters such as Matthias Weischer and today he is especially important to younger artists in Eastern and Central Europe.

His masterly paintings of architectural structures are devoid of human life and hover between abstraction and representation. Puder places chaos and quietude side by side. Symbols of human creation, industrialization and desolation are rendered in extreme perspectives, in front of dimly hued skies. Puder’s scenes induce a sense of calm disorder, or animated stillness, perplexing and haunting as they appear to the beholder.

Puder completed his undergraduate studies at The Maleriei and Grafik of the Hochschule for Grafik and Buchkunst, in Leipzig (then East Germany), with Professor Burger and Professor Bernhard Heisig; followed by a master’s degree with Professor Bernhard Heisig. In 1999 and 2000 he was included in the seminal exhibition After the Wall with venues at the following institutions: Nationalgalerie-Hambuger Bahnhof; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin (DE); Ludwig Museum, Budapest (HU); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Stockholm (SE); and Galerie Schwind, Frankfurt (DE). As a leading figure in the German art scene, his work is widely collected by institutions such as the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (DE); Kunstalle Sparkasse, Leipzig (DE); Museum der Bildenden Kunste, Leipzig (DE); Staatliche; Kunstsammlung, Dresden (DE); Stadtische Galerie, Wolfsburg (DE); Sammlung Bankhaus Metzler (DE); Sammlung Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt Main (DE); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt Main (DE); and Sammlung Hypo Vereinsbank, München, Germany (DE). In the United States he has exhibited at the Neuberger Museum of Art, in Purchase, NY and Hudson Valley MoCA, in Peekskill, NY.