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Phone: 206.789.7454 |
For Ulrich Pakker's artist's resume, click here ARTIST BIO
A Few Words From Ulrich Pakker: Inspiration, Exploration and the Fabrication of Dreams My artwork epitomizes my aspirations for public art: honor the community, celebrate the land and allow people space to interact with the art. The three stainless steel and glass sculptures that make up Arrived, the gateway sculpture for West Palm Beach, Florida, is inspired by mangroves, Caribbean rhythms, and the sense of home these beacons create. The twenty-five foot tall sculptures look as if they might pick up their feet and dance off of the plinth. But they won’t. Installed in 2009, the three-part sculpture has been called bold and iconic, organic and limber, as well as ancient-contemporary. Impeccably crafted like giant pieces of jewelry, they are evidence of my attention to design and studio skills learned over a lifetime devoted to working in metal. To conjure up this crescendo of shiny metal, glowing glass and sweeping lines demands I focus on competence and confidence. I turned out as a sheet metal journeyman in Germany at age 17, accruing a solid foundation in layout, design, and fabrication. Initially, I developed a body of work that included many vessels, and few contemporary sculptures. Then, in 2000, Nebula Torcida, was installed on Microsoft’s Cedar Court campus in Redmond, Washington. It is a fusion of design, my personal explorations and the love of fine craftsmanship that inhabits the heart of my artwork. Over the last decades, I have begun to incorporate other materials into my predominantly stainless steel sculptural work: water, glass and other metals such as, bronze, aluminum, gold and copper. I feel as though I am orchestrating these media, bringing them together using every means at my disposal from computer technologies to ancient Spanish windlasses and huge wooden wedges. The shapes and concepts conceived in my imagination are made visible using skills I have accumulated through four decades of problem solving. With each new piece, I work out questions of concept, design and fabrication. Each work creates momentum, movement and lyricism with strong visual flows. The clean, sure curvilinear shapes illustrate polar opposites: the metal’s strength is fashioned into sensuous curves; an impression of softness is created and accentuated by finishes and patinas. In my sculptural fountains, waterflows arc from metal mouths, birthing life and movement. Glass elements glow in the evening, creating a halo of softness around the work. The curvilinear nature of my work evinces an easy, elegant grace making my work accessible to all spectrums of the public. My work has appeared on the grounds of the Seattle Art Museum, at the University of Pennsylvania and across the country in public and private collections. I have been featured in The Guild Sourcebook of Architectural and Interior Art. My work currently appears in many galleries and outdoor sculpture exhibitions. My work was featured in a special exhibit entitled "The Language of Sculpture" in Portland, Oregon’s Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts where I won both the Curator’s Award and a Blue Ribbon in the Festival’s Open Show. All elements in my sculptural works are touchable, safe for children and made of durable materials, using recycled materials whenever possible. The public enjoys my work on so many levels – art and esthetics, engineering and inventiveness, nature and artificial constructs. Each sculptural evolves as I walk around it. Light dances off edges and is sucked up by dark patinas. In the graceful, organic forms of my art there is a faint echo of the flight of dry leaves in the wind, the dim memory of a raindrop’s shape and the movement of clouds. And yet, executed in metals, my art pieces counterbalance the impermanence of nature’s creations. |
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