Many well-known buildings and structures from Offenbach can be rediscovered in Ursula Zepter’s works.
© Gries
In the past, some cities and towns were only valid when they were portrayed as a copper engraving by the Swiss Renaissance master Matthäus Merian. Today the painter and graphic artist Ursula Zepter, who was born and raised in Offenbach in 1948, does this in a timely manner. She calls her art mixture, which is also very well-founded in terms of craftsmanship, “Main Town Feeling”, which she has been sending out into the world from “Atelier 13” in Obertshausen for 30 years.
Obertshausen – “I have to make something out of it” is a standard sentence of the creative powerhouse that knocked hard on the door of Offenbacher Werkkunstschule at the age of 16, which years later became the Hesse School of Design. In 1964, Zepter was still too young for university lecturers. So the early-talented draftsman completed an apprenticeship as a color lithographer in Offenbach from 1965 onwards. Her father, the well-known mold maker and carpenter Karl Schwinn, would have preferred to see her in his carpentry workshop. But his daughter got her way – to this day. From 1973 to 1979 she completed her art and photography studies at the HfG and became a qualified designer. From 1985 she dared the step into the freelance art, since 1992 she settled with her family in Obertshausen. For 30 years she has been developing new ideas from Atelier 13 in the former rooms of a small fine bag maker, for which she received the Offenbach District Culture Prize in 2012, among other things. Of her numerous works, the brightly colored paintings and digital collages of the “Main-Town-Feeling” series are the best known, with their multifaceted symbiosis of cubist breakdown of shapes, expressively set lines of force and surfaces, and often pop color effects.
The artist says: “Regardless of whether I had diphtheria as a child or a dangerous typhoid infection as a 23-year-old, I emerged from life crises stronger and with determination.” Art is her central theme, which has helped her in all situations. In the studio one encounters Zepter’s art stations: the parodistic “women images”, figurative paintings and images of people or the three-part painting “Beyond Time”. And then of course there would be her masterpieces for the construction of the Offenbach S-Bahn and original designs for large murals in Bieber-Waldhof, which the Offenbach spray artist Marcus Dörr translated into large format on house walls and in S-Bahn underpasses. You can see how organically high-rise towers, bridges, gardens, apartment blocks, churches and palaces of Frankfurt and Offenbach have merged.
The versatile artist gives an insight into her meticulous methodology: “My digital collages were by no means simply created by moving around in the photo shop of my MacIntosh.” First, she needs inspiration, draws her initial image. Clarifies its structures, adds colors. Only then are digital photos created, which are overlaid with other photos and sections of the painting. “Up to 30 image levels can arise in this way.” Up to now, nobody has been able to imitate the truly multi-layered artist’s compositions, which also impress in a sprayed version on house walls, as large posters at bus stops or as a motif on T-shirts. With such creations, Zepter also creates identity in remote parts of the city. The artistic kaleidoscope of the “Main Town Feeling”, its set pieces, its overlapping and intermingling of the spatial levels, its curvatures and falling lines, which make one almost dizzy when looking at it, is more than just an artificial reflection of architecture. The imagery, which also has a lot to do with Zepter’s life curves, represents our uncertain time, in which the ground begins to fluctuate, not just because of Corona. In our dynamic urban world and its upheavals, she has set herself up amazingly crisis-proof and – in her own way – is making the best of it step by step. It is always astonishing how Zepter’s art is not only magical in the Römer or Lili-Park. (By Reinhold Gries)
Information on the Internet at atelier-13.de
–
