Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

The two parallel retrospective exhibitions that are looking back over Reiner Ruthenbeck’s career at Duisburg und Düsseldorf complement each other illuminatingly. The Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg has gathered Ruthenbeck’s early sculptures, supplemented with drawings and photographs. In contrast to this, the spatial works produced since the 1970s unfold their full impact powerfully in the spacious halls of the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle, while his conceptual projects, such as the kinetic objects and noise pieces, can be examined in the less hectic Seitenlichtsaal. The principle of reciprocal complementarity can be applied more widely to all Ruthenbeck’s oeuvre, in both formal and substantive terms. Inspired by the realisation that completeness itself cannot be represented, he believes and has understood that we are most likely to get close to it by articulating contradictory phenomena of the most diverse kinds and reconciling them with one another. When he seeks to do this, oppositions of colours, materials and forces are highlighted to great effect: for instance, hard and soft, supporting and weighing down, lying and falling, stretching and pulling together, black and white, hot and cold.

Concentration on permanent concerns

This artistic methodology is nourished by a particular idea of aesthetics and ethical attitude: In it, there is no place for formal languages that strive desperately for the easy effect or fashionable currents with short half-lives. In consequence, it is possible to concentrate on permanent, essential concerns with long half-lives instead. This places Ruthenbeck among a group of avant garde artists who confronted the public with minimalist forms and conceptual and process-based projects in the mid-1960s. The trained photographer cast off his tendency towards surrealism during the early 1960s, giving up photography in favour of sculptural formulations. A trace of his original surreal view of things still echoes in his first sculptures: swelling drop shapes, permeable umbrellas and outsized spoons. At the same time, the black-and-white photograph Geblähte Gardine (Billowing curtain) of 1963 is already going beyond the merely puzzling effect of the curtain that is moved by an invisible force, that pushes forward and throws shadows. The artist pursues his inclination to break through the two-dimensional, overlaying the hard material of the mullion and transom with the soft, falling fabric. The opposition of hiding and showing is also startlingly apparent in the photograph of laundry packed into bundles in a window.

At the beginning of the show in Duisburg, however, the visitor is surprised by works that date from 1968: six black cones of ash. While the crumbly ash has itself fallen into its cone shape, someone has then pushed, slipped and wound shaped pieces of iron – bars, angular containers and wires – into and around the ash. The light exhibition room, in which significant programmatic pieces from the 1960s are spread out without being separated by partition walls, radiates an agreeable atmosphere of quiet; the pared-down objects in their black and bright red seem to be held in an unstable balance. No matter how distanced they seem, they wait for the viewer’s thought to fill out the harmonies between them: ladders that can never be climbed, a rubber ring distorted out of its circular form, a suitcase riddled with holes, a simple wooden table covered with a red cloth.

Reduction and abstraction

Nowadays, this organically soft textile has disappeared from Ruthenbeck’s vocabulary. As the exhibition in Düsseldorf shows, the non-colours black and white and the contrast of red and blue offer a high degree of reduction and abstraction. Yet soft, dark-red pillows (2008) gaze down from the balustrade at the new aspects taken on by older works in the fresh setting of the high Kinosaal. Here, the Weißer Papierhaufen (White heap of paper) of 1979 echoes its black counterpart and the piles of ash, which it recreates and transforms with smooth sheets of paper that have been crumpled and heaped up into exactly contoured shapes with irregular textures on which the light plays in a richly nuanced fashion. The ideas of crossing over and merging, which have already been exploited with gusto in Ruthenbeck’s ladders, bars and ribbons, as well as the object in which a video is partially concealed, culminate in the Endlose Überkreuzung Blau/Rot auf zwei Spiegeln (Endless crossing blue/red on two mirrors) of 1986. In their infinite mirroring, the materiality of the objects dissolves, spaces open up and movements and forces are channelled together where they intersect; here, opposites are cancelled out in a single point and ‘the transition from one state to another’ is made possible. Geräuschskulpturen (Noise sculptures), in which he exploits phenomena taken from daily life. Teppichklopfen (Rug beating) of 1973/74 and Dachskulpturen (Roof sculptures) of 1972 still require a vinyl record or audio tape in order to present the acoustic equivalent of their visual embodiment, but when it comes to the photographs Rolladen (Roller door) of 1978 and Sörgeln (Sookin’) of 1999 the viewer hears the annoying rattling of a garage door and the appreciative slurping of two boys without being aware of the source the sound is coming from. In these pieces, as in the kinetic objects, it is primarily his precision that distinguishes Ruthenbeck’s works, as well as their subtlety and a subliminal sense of humour that frequently results in a relaxed feeling of good cheer. In all likelihood, it is only someone who has meditated regularly for years without stealing away from the world of the here and now who would be capable of counterpointing tension and relaxation, intellectual astuteness and sensuous sensitivity in this suggestive way.