Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, contemporary art is full of networks woven by media geniuses and curators obsessed with the latest prodigy. But sometimes, only sometimes, you encounter an artist who truly works in the sacred silence of her practice, as if the outside world does not exist. Ulla Hase is one of those. This German artist, born in 1966 in Kiel and based in Brussels, creates drawings that emerge in a space-time where thought and bodily movement merge into a meditative and deeply physical dance.
What do we know about her? Winner of the Luxembourg Art Prize in 2023, this ballpoint pen artist, yes, you read that right, those cheap instruments handed to you by the mail carrier to sign a receipt, transforms this modest material into a tool of transcendence. In her Brussels studio, Hase engages in an act of stubborn repetition, tracing lines that accumulate, overlap, and ultimately vibrate before our eyes like the surface of a microscopic ocean.
Her work “Multiple silences” (2023), six monumental ballpoint pen drawings on paper, plunges us into a sea of blue lines that seem to pulse, breathe, and extend to infinity. It is a work that categorically refuses our culture of immediacy and spectacle. Hase asks you to slow down, observe, and enter a contemplative state where perception becomes an active rather than passive activity.
What I like about her work is her deep relationship with absurdist literature, particularly that of Samuel Beckett. Haven’t you noticed? Like Beckett, there is in Hase this insistence on repetition that is never really repetition. In “Waiting for Godot” (1952), Beckett writes: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s terrible” [1]. Within this apparent monotony hides a whole cosmology of emotions and meanings. Similarly, Hase tirelessly repeats the same gesture, drawing a line, but each line is unique, vibrating with a particular intensity.
The Irish writer said: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better” [2]. Isn’t that exactly what Hase does? She draws, she starts again, she insists. She makes failure and attempt an aesthetic. Her drawings bear witness to a quasi-absurd perseverance before the void of the blank page, like Beckett’s characters who keep talking to avoid silence.
In her abstract geometric drawings, each line becomes a “word” in a personal visual language that, like Beckett’s, seeks to express the inexpressible. As she herself explains: “Drawing is a way to transform the line, a physical and mental space in movement. This interaction of hand and mind on paper helps me deepen and structure my emotions.”
Look closely at her work “Untitled” (2019), this immense composition in blue ballpoint pen on satin Arches paper. It looks like a complex weave formed day after day, gesture after gesture. The artist admits to having “lost herself in this blue landscape.” Isn’t this the same loss experienced by Beckett’s characters, wandering in a world where landmarks fade?
This similarity with Beckett’s universe is not anecdotal. It reveals a profound vision of human existence where the repetitive act becomes a form of resistance against the absurdity of the world. Each stroke is an affirmation: “I am still here.” Each completed drawing: “I have persisted.”
But it would be reductive to limit Ulla Hase’s work to this single lineage. There is a dimension in her work that also touches on organic architecture, and more specifically on the theories developed by the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa. In his book “The Eyes of the Skin,” he develops a phenomenological approach to architecture that favors the complete sensory experience rather than just vision [3].
Pallasmaa criticizes our eye-centric culture and calls for an architecture that engages all the senses, including touch. He writes: “The skin reads the texture, weight, density, and temperature of the material” [4]. Similarly, Ulla Hase’s drawings, although visual, evoke a deep tactile experience. By looking at her works, one almost physically feels the repeated movement of her hand on the paper, the pressure of the pen, the texture forming through accumulation.
This haptic dimension is evident in “Troubled times,” where the ink that overflows and bleeds outside the frame reminds us that we are facing a living material that reacts to the artist’s gestures. Her works are not cold and calculated representations of a preconceived vision, but spaces where the architecture of the drawing is built gradually, organically, through a constant dialog between the hand, the tool, and the surface.
As with Pallasmaa, there is in Hase an acute awareness of space as a place of bodily experience. Her drawings create virtual architectural spaces where the gaze can wander, get lost, rest. In “Multiple silences,” layers of blue lines generate a striking impression of depth and movement, inviting the viewer into a spatial exploration that engages the whole body, not just the eyes.
The Finnish architect argues that “architecture articulates the experience of being in the world and strengthens our sense of reality and self” [5]. Likewise, Ulla Hase’s drawings articulate the experience of being in a world of sensations and thoughts in perpetual motion. They anchor us in the here and now of perception while opening infinite spaces for contemplation.
This phenomenological approach to art aligns with Hase’s own philosophy, who states: “I am interested in questions of physical and intellectual knowledge. […] In my artistic work, I create interfaces by shaping both the temporal aspects and spatial dimensions of my environment.” Her art thus becomes a form of temporal and spatial architecture, a place to inhabit with the gaze and consciousness.
The monastic patience with which Hase creates her works defies our era obsessed with speed. She compares her process to the formation of charcoal: “It’s a bit like charcoal that forms under certain conditions. For millions of years, it stores energy that can be used much later.” This vision of art as a slow process of accumulating energy goes directly against our culture of immediacy and reminds us that some things simply cannot be rushed.
At a time when artificial intelligence promises to produce “masterpieces” in a few seconds, Hase’s manual and meticulous work represents an act of resistance. Each line drawn is a lived moment, a pulse of life that no algorithm can simulate. As she asserts: “The realm of personal experience is different from what the flow of digital images suggests.”
There is something deeply moving in this stubbornness to draw day after day, to repeat the same gestures without ever producing exactly the same result. Hase practices a form of artistic asceticism reminiscent of the medieval scribes, working in the solitude of their cells on manuscripts that few people would see.
And yet, this seemingly solitary work resonates with our contemporary condition. In an era overwhelmed with information, where “we are flooded with supposed facts 24 hours a day,” as Hase says, her drawings offer us a space for settling, a place where time dilates and thought can finally breathe.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Ulla Hase’s work is her ability to transform ordinary materials, a ballpoint pen, a sheet of paper, into vehicles of transcendence. She works with what everyone has at hand, but produces results that go beyond understanding. Isn’t that the very definition of artistic alchemy?
Her participation in the exhibition “Beyond the lines. Drawing in space” at Villa Empain in 2024 confirmed her place among contemporary artists who redefine the art of drawing. As a Belgian critic noted, her creations are “contemplative, even meditative” and generate “a surprising impression of depth and movement” [6].
Hase belongs to a lineage of female artists who have explored the potentialities of repetitive and meditative drawing; she cites Eva Hesse, Gego, Geta Bratescu, and Julie Mehretu among her “secret heroines.” But her voice is singular, rooted in her personal experience and her relationship to the world.
Born in northern Germany, in a Protestant family where “you had to do the work without complaining,” having spent her childhood picking up stones in the fields and watching her mother knit and embroider in the evening, Hase developed a work ethic that permeates every aspect of her artistic practice. This rigor is never austere or cold; on the contrary, it serves a profound expressiveness that touches the universal.
Ulla Hase’s art reminds us that in a world that values the spectacular and the immediate, true radicality may lie in taking one’s time, repeating a simple gesture until it reveals all its complexity, creating spaces of silence where what cannot be said can finally emerge. In Beckett’s words once again: “All speech is a stain upon silence” [7]. Hase’s lines are as many traces upon the white silence of the paper, forming a visual language that speaks directly to our senses.
I encourage you to immerse yourself in this universe of vibrant lines, in this blue ocean of materialized thoughts. You will not come out unscathed.
- Beckett, Samuel. “Waiting for Godot,” Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1952.
- Beckett, Samuel. “Worstward Ho,” translated from English by Édith Fournier, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1991.
- Pallasmaa, Juhani. “The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses,” translated from English by Jean-Paul Curnier, Éditions du Linteau, Paris, 2010.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Furniere, Andy. “Beyond the lines. Drawing in space in Villa Empain: dansen op een dunne lijn,” BRUZZ, July 2, 2024.
- Beckett, Samuel. “Molloy,” Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1951.
