Ulrike Rosenbach, Artist in distribution, Germany, 1943

Ulrike Rosenbach, born in 1943 in Bad Salzdetfurth near Hildesheim, is one of Germany's earliest and most renowned international video artists. She studied sculpture from 1964 to 1970 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where, among others, she followed a master class by Joseph Beuys; in 1975-76 she also studied feminist art and media art at California Institute of the Arts. Her work was shown internationally, including Documenta 6 (1977) and Documenta 8 (1987). Currently, she lives near Cologne and works as an art teacher and independent artist.

Since 1971, Rosenbach has created a continuous oeuvre of video works, installations and performances. Together with Klaus vom Bruch and Marcel Odenbach she formed the independent production group ATV (Alternativ TV), which was an independent pirate TV station in Cologne in the 1970s. Ulrike Rosenbach was also a pioneer in a generation of artists who simultaneously broke with, and built upon the tradition of action and performance art. For the first time, she combined the live action of performances with recorded video footage; in her closed-circuit works, video as a medium gained equal artistic value. In the 1980s, her video work became technically more complex; she started creating installations and video sculptures. Throughout, Rosenbach's oeuvre has a strong political inclination: many of her works are characterized by a feminist perspective, criticizing women's traditional representations and roles.