Una H. Moehrke

The exhibition and event series erreger- | EIGEN frequenz (agent or pathogen – eigenfrequency), 2018, on the perception, mediation, and visibility of giving, taking, and passing on, is Moehrke's last presentation in the context of her teaching. In interplay with the works of the Professor, twenty-seven different positions on the phenomenon of giving and the principle of impulse and resonance were presented in the Burg Gallery Halle.

At the center of another art-theoretical research project, Im Modus der Gabe (In the Mode of the Gift), 2011, stand models from theater, visual art, and performance, in which processes of exchange, transfer, and reciprocity are effective. Considering the performative development of contemporary art, the contributions examine the degree to which concepts of the gift that develop from ethnological, philosophical, and sociological perspectives (Marcel Mauss, Maurice Godelier, Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Paul Ricœur, etc.) prove viable for reflecting on the self-understanding of contemporary artistic practice in the field of tension between social effectiveness and the claim to autonomy.

In the 2008 project Geometry of Work, she presented artistic research and reflection processes on the heterogeneity of the current concept of work and its various manifestations, as well as documenting artistic transfer projects in concrete work milieus. A symposium in the Gallery for Contemporary Art (GfZK) in Leipzig discussed the geometry of work from its sociological, art-theoretical, and economic perspectives.

Beginning with the performative water drawings of the 1990s, Moehrke designed a large-format, experimental form of drawing that can be categorized as site-specific art and that stands in dialog with nature and architectonic environments, for example industrial architecture, sacred buildings, or park facilities. Moehrke says drawings can grasp something ungraspable. In them, the lines condense to emblems and, in some work complexes, refer to examples from art history. Thus, in Venice in 2015, the drawings were fragmentarily transposed from historical paintings into a free and contemporary language of lines. With small, linear interventions, tradition is transferred to contemporaneity (Personal Structures. Crossing Borders: These lines are dedicated to... Palazzo Bembo, 56th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, Venice 2015). Moehrke's art develops dialogically in the media of performance, photography, painting, drawing, and text.

Una H. Moehrke studied Painting at the Berlin University of the Arts (graduated in 1980 as a Master Student of Raimund Girke), along with Art History, Religious History, and Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. She has received stipends from the Berlin Senate, the State of Lower Saxony, and the German Academic Exchange Service and prizes from the Ilse Augustin Foundation, Berlin, the Federal Garden Exhibition in Berlin, and the Baer Art Center, Iceland. After lectureships and guest professorships in Berlin, Lüneburg, Kiel, Braunschweig, and Dresden, she was appointed a Professor at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle in 1994. There she taught until 2018 in the Faculty of Art and was a Professor for Art and Art Mediation Art Education. Ulf Aminde, Irmela Gertsen, Georg Lisek, Julian Plodek, Luise von Rohden, Juliane Schickedanz, Jochen Schneider, Ella Ziegler and others were taught by Moehrke. Along with her teaching, Moehrke pursued her own painting and drawing. Moehrke is a member of the International Artists Bureau and an associate member of the German Artists Association. She lives in Berlin.

Starting with the photographic and performative Self-Portrait on the Surface of the Water (1980s), the Moehrke continued to develop self-portraits as abstract heads in oil painting (end of the 1990s). From the original head and mirror image Icon, she extrapolated abstract surfaces that present themselves as mostly monochromatic pictures. Moehrke works with the reduction of line and color fields. In painting, the dematerialization of color produces shifting color fields that offer reflection surfaces for light and shadow like a mirror and that change with the changing position of the viewer. These are pictures that oscillate between appearance and disappearance. The viewer perceives them as the trace of a motion. With extremely reduced coloration, they open up spaces whose atmosphere is reminiscent of phenomena of light. The viewer can associate motion within the picture with the physical motion outside of the picture (PictureSpaceMotion, 2010). Her pictures painted since 2012 with metal pigments that seem white are her primary works, a further extended reduction of monochromy.

Una Helga Moehrke (born July 7 1953 in Hanover) is a German visual artist specializing in painting, drawing, performance art and experimental text. She was a Professor for Art and Art Mediation at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle from 1994 to 2018.