Late Female Surrealist Ursula’s Fantastical Paintings Are Gaining New Recognition

In a self-portrait by the late German artist Ursula, a bulbous eye fixes the viewer with a strong glare. Confident, wry, and entirely unique, it’s a painting that manages to encapsulate this artist.

This 1995 work, That’s me. So what?, lends its name to her first major museum show since the artist’s death in 1999. The retrospective, at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, comes at a moment for increased interest in this underappreciated artist’s work. As the history of Surrealism’s female protagonists is reconsidered, particularly through the 2022 Venice Biennale, figures like Ursula (full name Ursula Schultze-Bluhm), who stood on the movement’s sidelines, are receiving renewed attention.

Ursula’s paintings are often difficult to comprehend in a single glance. In My Berlin Dreams in Mittenwalde (1977), a barely-there face in the center of the painting melts with color. Intricately painted dots turn into psychedelic tentacles, as city spires grow out of clouds and waves of painted lines seem to turn into abstract vines or feathers. Marks are scratched delicately into layers of paint, one of her signature techniques.

Ursula was self-taught, unlike her husband Bernard Schultze, who was also a painter. Despite this comparison, she never doubted herself, even if her style was outside the mainstream, explained the show’s curator, Stephan Diederich, who met Ursula while curating a show of her husband’s work. As a child, Diederich explained, Ursula loved to hide away from adults, lost in her own worlds, a metaphor that seemed to spill over into her later artistic work, in which fantastical landscapes and ideas spiral across the canvas.

In addition to wall-based works, Ursula created several cabinets and doorways—an obsession of the Surrealists she is often compared to, for whom entryways are associated with the threshold of the mind and the outside world. Ursula’s The Great Cabinet of Pandora (1966), for instance, opens up to reveal a painted interior lined with animal fur, its doors decorated with twisted, ballooning faces. “Pandora’s box was not only evil for her,” said Diederich, referring to the Greek myth on the origin of evil. “It was more about all the possibilities.”

Ursula often portrayed faces as oddly contorted, with enlarged eyes and gaping, grinning mouths, and her paintings often use black backgrounds for their ghoulish subjects. The creepy landscape Nightmare (1961), for instance, depicts the fears that troubled her in the darkness of night—also the time of day that she worked, according to Diederich.

Though in her private life she remained comfortably within the gendered norms of the time (she organized her husband’s exhibitions and archive, for instance), in her work, she barely paid attention to distinguishing subjects’ gender. An example is The Two Guardians (1986), two painted human-size wooden cut-outs, where the figures have enlarged, monstrous ears and faces, yet appear noble, delicately decorated on either side in squiggling and sprawling motifs, and gilded along the sides. “If it’s a man, a woman, or in-between, this doesn’t matter for her. Everything is flowing in her works,” said Diederich.

Her paintings also reconfigure typical female archetypes—as in Salomé (1962), where the famous biblical character is almost faceless, made up of a stunning array of delicate, paint-dotted appendages. The bloody head that she holds is camouflaged by the busy Pointillist style and almost disappears into the background. Ursula’s Salomé appears warrior-like, but androgynous: a formidable figure who’s not defined by her gender.

This expansive view of gender is popular with younger visitors to the museum, said Diederich, and one of the many elements of Ursula’s work that has contemporary relevance. Another is her treatment of humans’ relationship to nature: Her unique painterly style turns the human world into metamorphic visions—a squiggle of jellyfish tentacles, or the regular cellular structures of microbial life. In Ursula’s work, said Diederich, “you don’t have plants and human beings and animals divided but it’s growing into each other—it’s a very exciting world,” he said.