Natur-Teile (3 Baumstämme) mit Tarnfarben-Anstrich (1. und 2. Natur)

In Timm Ulrichs’s work, cryptic ideas confront an ambiguous humor. His conceptual works and performances make him one of the most important contemporary German artists. Ulrichs, who describes himself as a “total artist,” combines two worlds in his work: the world of objects and the world of ideas. In »Nature Parts«, he explores one of the oldest themes of art history: the relationship between nature and art. Ulrichs has covered three real tree trunks in a painted camouflage pattern designed to make military hardware and soldiers invisible. The camouflage pattern imitates the natural environment and is designed to make something that is not part of nature, for example a vehicle, disappear. But in his own cryptic way, Ulrichs camouflages nature itself. The tree trunks are thus robbed of their naturalness by the camouflage, the pattern itself being a human invention. It is designed—like European art over the course of centuries—to create the illusion of the natural. In Ulrich’s work, the camouflage pattern generates precisely the opposite effect. We no longer perceive the trees as trees but as pure products of art, and become conscious of the thin line between nature and art, a theme addressed in many of Ulrichs’s works.