Ana Cristea Gallery is delighted to present artist Ulf Puder’s first solo show in New York. Puder’s quiet yet forceful paintings depict an uninhabited world composed of vast, luminous skies and off-kilter man-made structures. Employing a distinctive color palette dominated by grays and pastels and a visual language that is both figurative and highly-abstracted, Puder creates images that are as inexplicably beautiful as they are haunting.

In works like _ Waldbad _ and _ Schwestern , house-like structures are composed of flat and weightless planes of color, but some of these planes are askew or simply missing. The two bungalows in _ _Schwestern _ are so battered that they appear almost entirely open to the elements, and stray walls float in what seems to be an expanse of water covering the ground. _ Offenes Gelände _ suggests a slightly new direction for the artist: Puder’s paintings have often suggested the disarrayed and desolate aftermath of an unidentified natural disaster, but in this painting, which depicts a massive tornado approaching a backdrop of low-slung buildings, we seem to be witnessing the moment just before the destruction begins.

Born in Leipzig in 1958, Ulf Puder was a member of the now-famed first generation to graduate from the Leipziger Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. Along with Neo Rauch, also a member of this first generation, Puder was uniquely successful in melding East-German neo-realism with a more imaginative, dreamlike, even surrealistic vocabulary. His work is greatly admired by and has had a tremendous influence on a younger generation of Eastern European artists.

Puder has been included in recent group exhibitions at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; Camden Art Centre, London; Le Plateau, Paris; Museum de Paviljoens, Almere, Netherlands; Kunsthaus Dresden; Museo Municipal de Malaga; and the Prague Biennale 2. He has had solo exhibitions at Leipzig’s Dogenhaus Gallery, Wolfsburg’s Städtische Galerie, Amsterdam’s Torch Gallery, and Chicago’s Kavi Gupta Gallery.

For additional information, please contact Ana Cristea Gallery at (212) 904-1100 or at [email protected] The gallery is located at 521 West 26th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues and is open from Tuesday through Saturday from 11am to 6pm.