Ulrich Bernhardt

The Stuttgart-based artist Ulrich Bernhardt (*1942, Tübingen) is one of the most important pioneers of media art in Baden-Württemberg. His 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 and projects in public spaces. From 1965 to 1970, he studied painting 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. After a brief stint as a television journalist for the public broadcaster Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR; now SWR) he was a member of the research project »Communication Techniques for Architects« at the University of Stuttgart. In 1974 Bernhardt started to create his first socially orientated video works within the Stuttgart Communications Group, which later initiated the founding of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

As the 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 1981, Bernhardt established the concept of »künstlerische Forschung« (arts-based research) at the Künstlerhaus for forms of subjective experience and knowledge transfer. Unlike science, this type of endeavor does not seek empirical evidence, but combines personal experience with unusual, sometimes absurd methods.

Since the early 1980s, he has been exploring contemporary technologies and social change in connection with Greek mythology. He is particularly interested in how profound technological developments influence our minds, and how these fundamental processes can be described using conceptions from mythology. The connecting theme that runs through his works is the question of different dimensions of space and time, transience and permanence, in political as well as historical, scientific, and aesthetic contexts.

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.

Ulrich Bernhardt was awarded the Erich Heckel Prize from the Artists’ Association of Baden-Württemberg for lifetime achievement in 2022. His 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 with 245 video tapes, numerous publications and the mail art archive of the artist is housed at the ZKM.