Dr. URSULA M. LÜCKE

Dr. Ursula M. Lücke is an artist, cultural historian/image scientist and performer.
With her scientific-artistic theories and practices, she cultivates a perception that breaks with standards and categories and enables change as a humorous-irritating act. She focuses on New Treasure Art, Schatzkunst* (treasure art), Wunderkammer and water lust.

Lücke works across media and transdisciplinarily, innovatively combining science, material and value, art-craft and concept, lecture and lecture-performance, monstrosity and ineffable femininity, and curation and creation.

Lücke's work is understood as an act of self-assertion - provocative, liberating, overcoming outdated role models and is an aesthetic conception of life. They are statements that reveal power relations and criticise traditionally gender-specific attributions of certain techniques, materials and themes.

It is about a reformulation of freedoms in dealing with the body and materials, the expanded concept of art (Joseph Beuys) and the recognition of SchmuckKunst (jewellery art) and Schatzkunst* (treasure art) as an art genre in their own right - demanded and fulfilled by Veronika Schwarzinger / Verena Formanek (Galerie V&V) and Inge Asenbaum (Galerie am Graben) as early as the 1980s**. Lücke's work is in this tradition. However, it takes up current avant-garde positions with queer-feminist and ecological perspectives as well as with regard to the use of materials in her New Treasure Art.

Her oeuvre is about the definition of identity. New Treasure Art, Schatzkunst and SchmuckKunst is a tool for communication between the wearer/viewer and the environment. The precious materials gold and silver in high alloys (900 gold, 925 silver) are used conceptually to create precious objects. Lücke counters the motto "Never again gold!" of the 1970s with the concept that all materials represent capitalism, colonialism and exploitation. What matters is the social, ecological and political conditions under which they are mined or recycled. Gold contains in high potency what is negotiated with every T-shirt: the (in)responsible use of resources, people, the environment/world and waters.

In her work, eco is concept - the material is recycled in avant-garde practice: in works of New Treasure Art, performances and texts. This concerns the deliberate reuse of 'Nazi gold' for works with queer bodies, as well as the use of mass-produced items of male-dominated model-making in H0 = 1:87 scale. It also concerns the artificial found objects (objet trouvé) whose use value has been washed away, as well as the recycling of ancient themes with role reversal. The concept of the New Treasure Art thus combines the use of technology, art, science and traditional craftsmanship at the highest level.

* Dirk Syndram was director of the Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden and coined the term Schatzkunst (treasure art) for works of art by goldsmiths in cabinet of curiosities (Kunst- und Wunderkammer) of the Renaissance and Baroque periods - cf. Dirk Syndram, Schatzkunst der Renaissance und des Barock : das Grüne Gewölbe zu Dresden, Deutscher Kunstverl., München 2004.
** cf. Ursula Guttmann etal. (Hg.), Mit Eigensinn*, Schmuck aus Österreich. Künstlerinnen im Fokus, arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart 2022.