Between soap and air: My friend Ullman at MAK

This brings to the forefront the actor of the movement movement, who died largely forgotten in the German city of Konstanz on Lake Constance in 1995. Konstanz was the final site of an eventful biography that took Viennese, born in 1905, from Austria to Germany and Switzerland.

Ultimately, her entire artistic work consisted of stage designs, costumes, furniture molds, commercial drawings, and last but not least, her photographs that could be attributed to the kinetic movement. All of this is on display in collaboration with the Städtische Wessenberg-Galerie Konstanz, whose director Barbara Starck tracked down the property in a dusty warehouse during the coronavirus pandemic.

A photo series containing 10 photos

Perhaps Ullmann was never a simple person or a simple artist. Neither in life nor in its treatment. “While searching, My Ullmann appeared like a bar of soap: every time I thought I had it, it would slip away again,” Stark recalls. At the same time, co-curator Catherine Pokorny Nagel was commissioned to write a biography of the artist. “My Ullman was somehow levitating,” Pokorny-Nagel stressed.

Between wallpaper designs and advertising themes

Together they have now put together the first Austrian retrospective of the artist at MAK, who constantly reinvented herself in new places and new positions throughout her life. At the age of sixteen, she began studying at the Vienna School of Applied Arts with Franz Cizek and, along with colleagues such as Elisabeth Karlinski and Erika Giovanna Klein, became one of the main proponents of Actionism, strongly reminiscent of Cubism in its form. Stylistics of geometric shapes and strong colors with an emphasis on movement and body.

But early in 1930, Ullmann, who soon replaced her real first name Maria with the synonym “May,” left Vienna for Switzerland. Over the years, not only different marriages and relationships followed, but also career fields. She created wallpaper designs for Backhausen, designed advertising decorations for Humanic and Thonet, created stage and costume designs for Zurich and Berlin, and later opened her own interior design studio in Münster under the title “My Studio”, where she created designs for art. In architecture, fountains or furniture made.