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Exhibitions
- Ulrich Rückriem
Works
11/11/2016 - 14/01/2017
The sculpture of Ulrich Rückriem (Düsseldorf, 1938), now the protagonist of what is his fifth solo exhibition at the Galería Heinrich Ehrhardt, takes the artisan work of stone carving as its point of departure. From there, the physical, poetic and formal language of Rückriem takes flight in what is most core to the practices derived from said trade; cutting, splitting, sanding, smoothing or polishing. The material itself puts the most elemental questions of sculpture at the forefront. In his minimal working of the stone, sometimes cutting, sometimes dividing, on occasions removing and at others altering, enormous questions are raised regarding the essence of the sculptural and the need of the artistic.
Rückriem, who was both closely associated with, and significantly involved in, the course of post-avant-garde sculpture at the end of the Sixties, through his early and celebrated work in which he dissected a block of stone through five cuts, built up a place for his sculpture by absorbing different positions which on the one hand originated in the avant-garde, when modern sculpture had not yet freed itself of the figurative and, on the other hand, in that crucial moment at which sculpture stopped being volume and gave way to spatial constructions. Rückriem and other artists of his generation (Carl André or Sol LeWitt) offered, in simple forms, a clear reading of how sculpture is organised and generated from within its own nature.
Through an “exceptional legibility and transparency” of the sculptural language, as the critic and curator R.H. Fuchs observed, Rückriem revives certain metaphors of classicism in his interpretation of the mystery and power of the stone, but in this case translated to abstract volumes. There is a maxim, a motif, which is repeated in his sculpture and is once again recurrent in this show of his work. The block of natural stone remains visible as an origin, and its organism distances itself from symbolic formulas. In all of the series throughout his oeuvre, steles, columns, cubes, floor or wall reliefs, the sculpture is autonomous, independent; it does not form part of a greater architectural structure but, in its profound definition, brings together the essence of the artisan cutting and carving happening in a quarry.
On this occasion the two pieces of sculpture making up the exhibition constitute diverse trials in the mode of cutting, sectioning, splitting or dividing the stone. One of the pieces is Anröchte dolomite sandstone, rectangular and vertical, with a saw cut at its base which makes it possible to carry out a straight and stable section, and another, wedge cut, which enables the stone to break along its natural structural veins. The other piece is made up of a group of stones in the form of cubes with five sawn faces, showing a smoother and flatter texture, and one natural face in which it is possible to see the rough and rugged nature of the dolomite, and whose geometric composition occupying the area of a square, and mathematical possibilities based on the game of chess, allow for 92 possible alternative positions. Finally, as a complement to this serene composition, in the line of his sculpture’s radical nature, Rückriem displays a series of drawings in which a coloured rectangle occupies the centre of a sheet of paper of a different colour to form a geometric composition which, like the rest of the exhibition, refers back to the primitive state of his conception of art.
Each stone and each cut, each specific position of the pieces arranged over the space of the gallery, concentrate and respond naturally and purely to the seed of Rückriem’s sculpture.