Jens Ullrich

Born in Tanzania in 1968, Trained in Düsseldorf—Biography and the 1990s Artistic Environment

Ullrich was born in Tukuyu, Tanzania, in 1968, studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and has been based in Berlin since 2008. ZKM’s current profile records his year and place of birth and describes his method of combining fragments from found images into new motifs^*1. Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa gives the same biographical information and notes that from 1999 to 2006 he ran the exhibition space Alexanderstraße in Düsseldorf with friends^*2. Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek’s authority record also confirms his 1968 birth in Tukuyu, which rules out older references that identified him as born in Germany in 1972^*3. In Düsseldorf during this period, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation were often treated beyond medium-specific purity, and post-conceptual artists used existing cultural images and exhibition systems as material. Ullrich likewise turned away from searching for new subjects and toward reusing images that already circulated with established meanings in newspapers and magazines.

Press Photography and Appropriation—When the “Original Context” Falls Away

Press photographs of news, politics, and sports became a major source for Ullrich in the 2000s. In the ongoing Masken series, begun in 2004, he digitally combines black-and-white newspaper photographs taken in various African countries with images of African masks; the European Month of Photography Berlin describes a group of roughly forty such collages^*23. In the 2006 Willkommende Gemeinschaft / Plakate, the concrete demands written on protest placards were already replaced with abstract ornament. Bergische Kunstpreis materials record that Ullrich had collected press photographs of political demonstrations for years and replaced the protesters’ critical messages with abstract, decorative images^*22. Schirn Kunsthalle later presented this work in an exhibition on political representation, describing how slogans found in newspaper photographs were removed and replaced with abstract Letraset forms before the images were remade as posters^*21. Appropriation here is not simply the borrowing of existing art. By detaching words, faces, or body parts from photographs originally made to communicate information, Ullrich tests how readily political meaning can become another image.

After Photomontage and Appropriation—From Heartfield to the Pictures Generation

The method of cutting printed images and reconnecting them to new meanings has a long history. MoMA presents John Heartfield’s photomontages as works that combined fragments from newspapers and magazines to attack Nazi propaganda politically^*24. The Met describes the Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 1980s as a period in which the rephotography and reuse of magazines, advertisements, and artworks made appropriation a central photographic method for unsettling authorship and originality^*25. No source reviewed here establishes direct influence from these artists on Ullrich, but his work emerged after both methods had already been historicized. His difference lies in making fragmentation itself a test of how much political or historical meaning disappears when an image is detached from its source—and what still remains afterward.

Flieger—Joining the Instant of Photography to the Permanence of Sculpture

In Flieger, Ullrich combines contemporary sports press photographs—soccer players, gymnasts, runners suspended in midair—with heads and body fragments cut from classicizing sculpture of the Nazi period. In an interview with Sport in Art, he explains his attraction to airborne athletes as moments the naked eye can barely perceive but the camera can freeze, while noting that once sculptural fragments are cut from their original setting, their ideological origins become harder to identify^*5. VAN HORN’s exhibition text for Flieger likewise records the method of cutting and joining sports images from newspapers and magazines with state sculpture produced between 1933 and 1945^*4. The photographic medium is crucial to the comparison. Sports journalism freezes the body as a decisive instant of victory; sculpture monumentalizes an ideal body in stone or bronze. Two opposing temporalities are attached within a single image. Because Ullrich works with photographs that have already circulated in the press rather than staging new athletes himself, the media system that produces contemporary heroic bodies remains present as part of the material. The ideal body fixed by the state and the ideal body produced moment by moment by the press can then be seen through similar poses and radically different histories.

Removing Language from Protest Photography—Tate Modern’s Media Burn

In Tate Modern’s 2006–07 exhibition Media Burn, Ullrich showed altered press photographs of demonstrations in which writing on placards had been turned into meaningless signs. Tate’s announcement preserved by e-flux frames the exhibition around the boundaries among art, politics, protest, and media and notes Ullrich’s hollowing out of slogans within documentary photographs^*6. A contemporary Guardian review also discusses this operation and offers a critical assessment of its political effect^*7. The crowd’s bodies and expressions remain visible while the words identifying their demands disappear, exposing the gap between a generic “image of protest” and specific political content.

Collage Does More Than Mix Histories—It Breaks the Authority of Images

Ullrich’s 2008 Kollekte, made with Jan Albers at Museum Morsbroich, was cataloged as an intervention that combined works from the museum collection with the artists’ own production and altered meaning through display^*8. The museum’s institutional history likewise records Ullrich as an artist who intervened directly in the collection^*9. A contemporary KUNSTFORUM review describes how Baroque sculpture and modern painting were joined to other objects and arrangements to produce new associations^*10. The same attitude appears in Flieger: instead of preserving existing photographs intact, Ullrich cuts them and places them in contact with other images so that classifications and values that once appeared natural become unstable.

Refugees In A State Apartment—Placing the Press Image’s “Waiting Body” Inside a Historic Residence

For Refugees In A State Apartment (2015), Ullrich composited people photographed around the refugee reception center in Berlin-Moabit into black-and-white photographs of a historic industrialist’s residence in Bremen that was then for sale. ZKM explains how the “nowhere” condition of waiting immediately after arrival and the temporary placement of bodies inside opulent interiors create simultaneous impressions of intimacy and rootlessness^*11. CONTACT Photography Festival presented the series in Toronto in 2016 within the European refugee crisis and questions of reception and visibility^*12. In the artist’s account published by ArtRabbit, the house’s overlapping meanings as refuge, living space, and cultural property become part of the project’s metaphor^*13.

Bilder ohne Geld—Returning Reproducibility to the Economy of the Work

In the 2021 book Bilder ohne Geld, Ullrich made roughly three hundred earlier photomontages available as templates for scanning, allowing anyone who borrowed the book from a public library to enlarge, print, and hang them independently. Museum Abteiberg describes the project as removing artworks from ordinary systems of purchase, price, and ownership and turning the book into an analog image source^*14. In the artist’s statement cited by the museum, Ullrich argues that although photographs and images are technically reproducible, framing, conservation, transport, insurance, and limited editions create scarcity and restrict that freedom^*14. WDR likewise reported on the photobook as a collection of works and printing instructions that made Ullrich’s large photomontages reproducible by anyone^*15. Kunststiftung NRW records its support for a publication that distances itself from art-market systems of edition size, image rights, and sale price^*16. An artist who cut other people’s photographs in Flieger now gives others permission to cut out, enlarge, and rehang his own images. The logic of appropriation reverses direction: from an artist’s freedom to use other people’s images to a viewer’s freedom to use the artist’s images.

From “Viewing a Work” to Taking It Home and Reproducing It

A K21 discussion of Bilder ohne Geld presented the release of twenty years of photomontages as a commons, considering both collage’s political force and its resistance to the art market^*17. In a taz interview, Ullrich speaks of the difficulty of seeing an image in a gallery without also seeing the price and capital that surround it^*18. The technical reproducibility of photography thus becomes a concrete design question about who can access a work, not simply a general theory of mechanically reproduced art.

After Appropriation, Making the “Source” of a Photograph Part of the Work

Contemporary Art Library records show Ullrich’s work recurring in solo exhibitions, collaborations, and installation settings^*19. His collages do not primarily erase sources in order to make seamless fantasies. They force image systems with different origins—sports journalism, state sculpture, demonstration photography, real-estate photography—into the same pictorial field. Meaning depends on what the photograph depicts, what it was made for, and where it circulated. If the source disappeared completely, the collage could end as an exercise in strange bodily form. By preserving the difference between institutions such as the sports press and state sculpture, Ullrich makes the viewer parse several histories within a single image.

Photographic Significance—From Photographer to Editor, Distributor, and User

Ullrich was included in Photo Art: Photography in the 21st Century, a survey of twenty-first-century photography that situates him among practices expanding beyond a photography centered on taking pictures^*20. In Flieger he cuts photographs; in Refugees he transfers bodies into another space; in Bilder ohne Geld he asks viewers to reproduce the work themselves. Seen together, the three projects make clear that photographers alone do not determine an image’s meaning. Ullrich makes the life of a photograph—through editors, display institutions, owners, and copyists—part of the work. His practice examines how photographs continue to acquire new meanings through politics, memory, and markets after they enter public circulation; appropriation becomes more than simply “using someone else’s image.”