REVIEW CRITICAL
Posted on December 14, 2023
Ursa Schoepper
Beyond the Bounds of Image: Dreamlike Avant-Garde in Ursa Schoepper's
Photography – Beatrice Cordaro, Art Historian and Curator
Experimental, avant-garde: Ursa Schoepper's photography transcends the boundaries of reality, transporting the observer into a dreamlike, surreal, immersive dimension. Ursa's photography is a work in progress, transforming through diverse perceptions and broadly echoing the commitment of Dada photography. Consider the photographic experiments of Man Ray, which profoundly and positively marked the development of alternative and avant-garde photography.Historically, as early as 1924, André Breton, in drafting the Surrealist Manifesto, emphasized the importance of two elements that could open new daily scenarios: chance and the unconscious.
For the surrealists, and somewhat as heirs of the Dada movement, chance, dreams, and the unconscious were new interpretive keys. Many photographers embraced these new ideas and trends. In 1929, photography began to play an autonomous role in the Bauhaus context. In this regard, Ursa continues what was experimented with a century ago, providing innovative forms of photography capable of astonishing both visually and emotionally. She is an original and intriguing artist who creates works with complex structures, yet visually minimal, elegant, and essential. Ursa is an artist to be critically studied, analyzed with attention to extract everything contained in her artistic universe: architecture, technique, color, nuances, historical-artistic roots. Today, it is important to analytically study the art of contemporary artists who live in the present, leaving delightful fruits for posterity. Ursa creates metaphorical works, working with the material as if they were notes of a symphonic score: her images, her fragments, bind together like music in which minor and major scales merge, dance together, reaching to strike the emotional universe of the audience. An illusionist, composer, photographer, artist, Ursa embodies the essence of multidisciplinarity, offering the opportunity to dream with eyes wide open.
