- Interiors, 2006 (3’10’’). Courtesy of the artist & Monitor Gallery, Rome. Presented by Whitechapel Gallery, London, England (www.whitechapel.org)
Austrian born artist Ursula Mayer choreographs female protagonists against a background of iconic architecture and clues drawn from cultural history. Cutting between monochrome and colour, erotic movement and statuesque pose, Mayer’s films offer a distillation of space and time.
Interiors is set in the home of the Hungarian émigré architect Erno Goldfinger and his wife, heiress and artist, Ursula Blackwell. Their famous modernist apartment in Hampstead, London, which houses sculptures by Barbara Hepworth and Max Ernst, is dramatised by two women, who like chameleons, take on the appearance of 20th century avant-garde works of cinema and art. They do not meet, ascending and
descending its spiral staircase and occupying its rooms through movement and touch. Their focus is a rotating sculpture by Barbara Hepworth which becomes a beacon for silent communication between two generations.
Candy Stobbs and Andrea Tarsia
Ursula Mayer, born in Upper (Austria), currently lives and works in London. Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna on 1996 and later conducted further Studies in art in the Royal College of Art, London and obtained her MA from the Fine Art Goldsmiths College in London, UK. Her most recent solo exhibitions include Nought to Sixty, ICA, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK in 2008 and The Crystals of Time, Lentos, Museum of Modern Art, Linz, AT, in 2007. She has also been part of major Group exhibitions in some of the most respected art institutions such as the RCM Art Museum, Nanjing, China, Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, AT, Ursula Blickle Foundation, Kraichtal, Germany, DE, among others. In 2009 she received the Federal Ministry award for Fine Art, Viena.