Ulrike Arnold: Meteorite Paintings

Ulrike Arnold was born in 1950 in Düsseldorf, Germany. She studied music and art from 1968 to 1971, where she received a degree in Teaching and Education from the Cologne University for Applied Science, Leverkusen. She then worked as a Master Teacher until 1988 in Hilden. From 1979 to 1986 she studied fine arts at the Düsseldorf academy in Professor Klaus Rinke's Master’s class. She was granted the Eduard von der Heydt stipendium of Wuppertal in 1988. Since 1980 she has traveled in the Western United States, South America, Africa, Europe, Australia, and Asia to work onsite. She currently resides and works primarily in Düsseldorf and in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Arnold has been painting on location around the world and using local minerals for pigments since 1980. In 2003, while on a tour of Meteor Crater in Arizona, she met Marvin Killgorne, who with his wife Kitty owns and operates the Southwest Meteorite Laboratory. Their business collects and trades meteorites worldwide, some of which Marvin slices into thin sections, etches, and polishes for analysis by scientists. The “kerf,” or material lost in the cutting as dust, that he has collected for years was given to Arnold as a mineral pigment for a series of paintings. This gave her an opportunity to create paintings not based on Earth pigments, but interstellar material. Southwest Meteorite Laboratory has authenticated and supplied the meteorite materials which are used in this series of paintings. These particles from six meteorites were found on four continents: Fukang, China; Gibbeon, Namibia; Cape York, Greenland; Campo de Cielo, Argentina; Canyon de Diabolo, Arizona; Portales, New Mexico.

Sky Paintings consists of nine small canvases created in 2011 in Utah that can be oriented in any direction and assembled in any formation for exhibition. The dark, yet highly refractive meteorite dust is mixed with a “transparent matte medium (acrylic binder),” which Arnold then uses to “paint” with on the canvases. Accompanying those canvases is a rectangular “color palette,” also made in Utah in 2011, that presents the range of local mineral pigments collected and used by Arnold in her Amangiri Resort series done the same year.

The archive also includes Utah diary notes from summer 2009, press materials, four video productions, self-composed musical compositions, digital images of artworks, and other miscellaneous materials.

• Artist Information: Artistic Output, Exhibition Ephemera, and Press Materials.
• The Ulrike Arnold: Mineral Paintings is organized into four folder