Ulrich Bernhardt
Year of birth, place
Role at the ZKM
- Artist of the Collection
Biography
Ulrich Bernhardt lives and works in Stuttgart as an independent artist and curator. From 1965 to 1970, he studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart under K.R.H. Sonderborg, among others, and founded a film class there in the context of reforming the program of studies, whose supervisors have included Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki. From 1971 to 1974, Bernhardt worked as a journalist for Süddeutscher Rundfunk public broadcaster television (SDR; now SWR, Southwest Broadcasting), and from 1973 to 1975 he was a member of the research project »Communication Techniques for Architects« at the University of Stuttgart. As one of the founding artists and first artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, he organized numerous exhibitions, symposia, publications, and participatory discourse formats from 1978 to 1986, promoting interdisciplinary exchange and international networking in media art. In 1981, Bernhardt established the concept of “künstlerische Forschung” (arts-based research) at the Künstlerhaus for forms of subjective experience and knowledge transfer. In 2009, together with Steffen Bremer, Michael Gompf, Kurt Grunow, Andreas Mayer-Brennenstuhl, Karin Rehm, and Harry Walter, he founded the Begleitbüro SOUP, the Stuttgart Observatory of Urban Phenomena, which undertakes long-term observation of urban processes in the local environment and makes the findings accessible to the public in the form of exhibitions, interventions, publications, and performative walks.
Bernhardt's artistic work is a heterogeneous combination of various media including painting, graphic art, photography, installations, and objects, but first and foremost film and video, as well as art in architecture, arts-based research, and projects in public spaces. Structured in groups, his works are based on many years of research and philosophical reflection. The artist views them as an open process in which new ideas are drawn out from what has already been created. He produced his first video works in 1974 and created his first video installation, »Der Fluss« (The River), in 1978. Since the early 1980s, Bernhardt has been engaging with current technologies and social change in connection with Greek mythology. The connecting theme that runs through his works, which combine subjective experience with often absurd methods, is the question of different dimensions of space and time, transience and permanence, in political as well as historical, scientific, and aesthetic contexts.
Ulrich Bernhardt's work has been exhibited extensively in Germany and internationally. His works are held in numerous public and private collections, including the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr in Dresden, the Haus der Geschichte Bonn, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (Rupertinum), the Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Since 2019, the audiovisual archive of the artist, who is one of the most important exponents of media art in Baden-Württemberg, is housed at the ZKM. In 2022, Ulrich Bernhardt was awarded the Erich Heckel Prize from the Artists' Association of Baden-Württemberg for lifetime achievement.