Die Stadt - Exhibitions

Campoli Presti is pleased to present Die Stadt, Christoph Ruckhäberle’s sixth exhibition at the gallery.

The visual world of Ruckhäberle is populated by odd hard-edged figures standing in front of rhythmic backgrounds. Vivid drawings of faces are composed from a rich and playful vocabulary of forms. The seemingly naïve quality of the paintings is subdued by a mysterious, bittersweet tone that gives a disconnecting feeling of timelessness and a sense of alienation in most of his characters.

The successive superposition of elements, selected and rearranged in various configurations gives a quality in Ruckhäberle’s work that he describes as “a construction of reality, not a representation or impression.” Rather than depicting reality, he builds scenes of interaction by distributing sharply separated figure fields and individual colour layers. These broken forms reveal the relationship between Ruckhäberle’s knowledge of classical painting and his training in film.

This most recent body of paintings reveals his interest in experimental German cinema from the 1920s which explored the use of fast cutting to create rhythm and rapid display of sequences. In Ruckhäberle’s series of sequenced portraits, each subject forms a distinct narrative unit yet connected by a certain mechanical rhythm. Just as Fritz Lang Metropolis’ stupefying repetitions of the clock, these reproduced figures end up estranged by automatism. Exploring the boundaries between the individual’s own and forced tempo, cinema’s ability to visualise movement is transferred into painting.