Ulrich Rückriem

On Wednesday 22 September 2010 at A arte Studio Invernizzi will open a solo exhibition devoted to the works of Ulrich Rückriem, an undisputed master of European sculpture since the mid-1960s. Seventy drawings from the creative cycle that has been at the heart of his work over the past three years will be on show.

The exhibition illustrates a particularly significant moment in Rückriem's artistic career, which is devoted to the graphic work that has always accompanied his research, and that has recently turned to colour as well.

Each of these drawings comes from an immediate and random approach to the surface: the artist overlays seven sheets of tracing paper and joins up the dots with which he has arbitrarily marked each one. These lines thus generate forms (and, consequently, also spatial relations) which the artist then colours.

Not without a certain degree of provocation, Rückriem considers it important to assert the arbitrary nature of the entire operation which emerges through this process. Furthermore, what distinguishes the artist's investigations in both painting and sculptural terms, is the real possibility not to exhaust the expressive condition of the work in a single solution. This is because the alternation of dots placed randomly on the sheets presupposes a wide range of formal resources: the freedom of the individual elements to arrange themselves in space and thus, through their interconnections, to be potentially modifiable, according to variable systems that reveal the aesthetic act to be a field of ever-changing forces.

At the same time, an exhibition of works by the German artist will be shown at Ars Now Seragiotto in Padua. Here, he has created two mural works in his 'Day and Night' series, in which his graphic works also appear in his wall paintings. The background for one is a white wall while for the other it is black, with a number of drawings interspersed on the surfaces, emphasising Rückriem's focus on the expressive potential of forms in space.

For the exhibition, a two-language catalogue will be published with reproductions of the works on show in the gallery in Milan and in Padua. It will contain an essay by Elena Forin, texts by Dorothee Bőhm, and biographical and bibliographical notes.

Ulrich Rückriem was born in Düsseldorf in 1938. In 1964 he put on his first solo exhibition at the Domgalerie in Cologne, and in 1969 he exhibited at the Galerie Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf. During the 1970s, several exhibitions were devoted to him in a number of museums, including the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, the Kunsthalle Tübingen, the Städtische Museum Abteiberg in Mőnchengladbach, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and the Kunstmuseum Bonn. In the 1980s and '90s, he put on great exhibitions in important public places, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Westfalisches Landesmuseum in Münster, the Krőller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Palacio de Cristal in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 2004 the Neue National Galerie of Berlin and the Stiftung Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg put on a solo exhibition of his works. In 2007 he was invited to put on solo exhibitions at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. In 2009 the Neue Nationalgalerie of Berlin devoted a large solo exhibition to his works.

Ulrich Rückriem