Amalia Ulman

Amalia Ulman
Born 1989
Argentina
Occupation Multidisciplinary Artist

Amalia Ulman (born 1989), is an Argentinian-born Spanish artist, whose practice includes performance, installation, video and net-art works.

Life

Amalia Ulman was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1989 and lived in Asturias, Spain, where she was raised after immigrating with her family. In 2009, she left Spain to study at Central Saint Martins in London, where she graduated in 2011.[1][2] In 2013, she was in a serious Greyhound bus accident that later informed her art practice.[3]

Amalia Ulman currently lives in Los Angeles.[4]

Work

Her work deals with issues of class, gender, and sexuality. Ulman is particularly interested in middlebrow aesthetics.[5][6][7]

In 2012, Ulman presented Profit | Decay, a show held with Katja Novitskova at the Gallery Arcadia Missa in London.[8]

In 2014, she presented two solo shows in Los Angeles, CA, "Used & New" at ltd los angeles and "Delicious Works" at Smart Objects. She also had the solo show "Baby Footprints Crow’s Feet" with Ellis King in Dublin, IE.[9]

The same year Amalia Ulman started “Excellences & Perfections,” a four month performance taking place on her personal Instagram.[10] In "Excellences & Perfections" Amalia Ulman fabricated a fictional character whose story unfolded in three different episodes[11] presenting her acting as three different personas: a 'cute girl', then a 'sugar babe' and finally a 'life goddess'. "The idea was to bring fiction to a platform that has been designed for supposedly “authentic” behavior, interactions and content. The intention was to prove how easy an audience can be manipulated through the use of mainstream archetypes and characters they’ve seen before." [12]

In October 2014, during Frieze Art Fair, Ulman presented a solo show "The Destruction of Experience" at Evelyn Yard in London. For the show Ulman made "The Future Ahead", a video essay about Justin Bieber's "growth from angelic teenager to hetero-normative white male".[13]

In January 2015, she presented "Stock Images of War", her first solo show in New York City at James Fuentes Gallery. It consisted in an immersive installation composed of twelve simple wire-frame sculptures, each one being titled after a different month of the year – i.e. “War in January”, “War in February”, etc.[4][14]

In 2016 "Excellences and Perfections" was selected to be included in the group exhibition, "Performing for the Camera" curated by Simon Baker at Tate Modern, London. (18 February 2016 — 12 June 2016).[15] The exhibition, which examines the relationship between photography and performance, brings together over 500 works spanning 150 years; from the invention of photography in the 19th century to the selfie-culture of today. Through Amalia Ulman's instagram-based project, "Excellences and Perfections", social media is examined in the art historical context of photographic performance.

The narrative which unfolded over the course of the performance was the following: "The provincial girl moves to the big city, wants to be a model, wants money, splits up with her high-school boyfriend, wants to change her lifestyle, enjoys singledom, runs out of money because she doesn’t have a job, because she is too self-absorbed in her narcissism, she starts going on seeking-arrangement dates, gets a sugar daddy, gets depressed, starts doing more drugs, gets a boob job because her sugar daddy makes her feel insecure about her body, and also he pays for it, she goes through a breakdown, redemption takes place, the crazy bitch apologizes, the dumb blonde turns brunette and goes back home. Probably goes to rehab, then she is grounded at her family house."[16]

Ulman has been described as the first social network based artist to enter top institutional galleries such as the Tate Modern.[17][18][19]

References

Links

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