The Power of Uta Weber’s Dots

"Joyful and colorful dots are slowly changing faces of galleries and facades of buildings in Germany. This is how it happened... A few years ago, artist Uta Weber was munching on Toffifee. Eating one after another, they stuck in her mind. Her installation at Maikäfer Flieg in Cologne was a celebration of them at its best. Enlarged and perfectly rendered sweets lost their connection to their sugary inspiration and even a bit with this planet, yet they did not come off as pop or too formal. Soon, Weber turned her back to their 3-D version - partly due to purely practical reason but most of all out of her need to interfere with the space inside and outside galleries. During the past few years, her work consisted of perforated colorful sticky foils placed in the windows of selected buildings and galleries.
First came composed pieces with two-color graphical symbol, reminding of a cut through an egg or the mentioned candy. Later, she was making empty circular openings. Replacing the three-dimensional rendering with its two-dimensional form has two effects: reality of colors and daylight is distorted for the viewer inside, while on the outside they attract attention by their advertising-like straightforwardness. At dusk and at night, effect of the installation strengthens even more as the lights inside are turned on. The building thus turns into a sort of site-specific paper lantern; Weber is walking the fine line between such opposite notions as advertising (visual language of advertising) and almost meditative minimal windows.
Weber admits her fascination by light and color - color in her view is complex though in people’s minds it remains a bit primitive, dull and vulgar in relation to art... What is considered nice is often black, white or gray here.
Wearing a suit while visiting a gallery and “arrangement“ is dropped here, instead Uta Weber involves the entire, otherwise empty space. Altered light penetrates color foil and its composed openings and enters the inside space. In her installation „Penthouse“ at Produzentengalerie in Kassel, the light even “burned“ clearly edged circles into the carpet.
Last year, Wewerka Pavillion in Münster went through face-lift which was designated only for viewing from the outside this time. A number of guests attending the opening did not understand such limitations and tried to open the locked gallery door. Somebody even made a hole in the gallery’s new coat so as to be able to see “more“. Showing altered buildings as art objects no longer satisfies the artist, she now intends to construct her future works from scratch.
Uta Weber is not a person who would be satisfied only with a few possibilities offered by one industry. In Australia, she organized slide projections accompanied by music - her friend Thomas Stimm improvised on his guitar while she projected images on a large screen. A few years ago, the two started Best of Our Planet Production company incorporating fashion and design. All of Weber’s work is united with simplicity, geometry and colors. Cologne, where she lives, is a very inspiring city with pounding cultural life and design. What the city lacks in its urban attractiveness (forever destroyed by bombarding during the World War II), is made up by its liveliness and curiosity. And playfulness that you won’t find in any other place in Germany.
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01.04.1999