Lisa Ruyter
12 Jan - 17 Feb 2008
LISA RUYTER
"The Comfort of Strangers"
Since 1996, Lisa Ruyter's paintings have been based on individual photographs taken by the artist and have, therefore, formed a map of her movements around the globe as well as her personal development. The photographs, although casual, are always intentional. One cannot imagine Ruyter photographing these scenes without an implied audience. Ruyter then selects a small percentage of these pictures and begins the process of fixing them in paint. She "transcribes" the photographs onto the picture plane, selecting the portions of the image that she wishes to render, leaving out details she finds trivial, while focusing on others. Once the paintings have been drawn in, Ruyter begins to map out colors, filling in her own drawings. The final fixing of the images occurs when Ruyter, usually in a single sitting, redraws the lines with a paint pen, bringing the painting into sharp focus.
The power of Ruyter's paintings lies in the way she takes on seemingly ordinary images and makes them extraordinary. What appear, at first, as giant paint-by-number works slowly reveal themselves to be complex arrangements of flat colors with poignant, powerful subjects. The effect freezes the narrative and pushes it toward abstraction. Ruyter titles all of her paintings after films, though any relation of the title to the subject matter is incidental.
Whether painting crowds, party scenes, fashion models swaying down the catwalk, trees or Greek island landscapes, Ruyter's need to document the world around her through this disinterested, removed lens where the viewer is both there and not there is the stance of an original artist with a keen eye and cool, distanced vantage point. About her work, Ruyter says, "I have consciously created a style that will keep the work interesting or relevant, and that will create points of entry for art historians as well as someone who has never before considered art."
The artist has shown her work in galleries and museums the world over, including, among others, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (USA), the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art (Istanbul), the Denver Art Museum (USA), Collection le Consortium (Dijon, France), La Colección Jumex (México), the Essl Collection (Klosterneuburg/Vienna), and Valencia Arte Contemporáneo (Spain). Lisa Ruyter has had more than twenty-five solo exhibitions in leading galleries around the world, and, in 2008, solo shows will be presented in Paris, Tokyo and Vienna. Her work has also been seen in numerous group shows and at international art fairs.
"The Comfort of Strangers"
Since 1996, Lisa Ruyter's paintings have been based on individual photographs taken by the artist and have, therefore, formed a map of her movements around the globe as well as her personal development. The photographs, although casual, are always intentional. One cannot imagine Ruyter photographing these scenes without an implied audience. Ruyter then selects a small percentage of these pictures and begins the process of fixing them in paint. She "transcribes" the photographs onto the picture plane, selecting the portions of the image that she wishes to render, leaving out details she finds trivial, while focusing on others. Once the paintings have been drawn in, Ruyter begins to map out colors, filling in her own drawings. The final fixing of the images occurs when Ruyter, usually in a single sitting, redraws the lines with a paint pen, bringing the painting into sharp focus.
The power of Ruyter's paintings lies in the way she takes on seemingly ordinary images and makes them extraordinary. What appear, at first, as giant paint-by-number works slowly reveal themselves to be complex arrangements of flat colors with poignant, powerful subjects. The effect freezes the narrative and pushes it toward abstraction. Ruyter titles all of her paintings after films, though any relation of the title to the subject matter is incidental.
Whether painting crowds, party scenes, fashion models swaying down the catwalk, trees or Greek island landscapes, Ruyter's need to document the world around her through this disinterested, removed lens where the viewer is both there and not there is the stance of an original artist with a keen eye and cool, distanced vantage point. About her work, Ruyter says, "I have consciously created a style that will keep the work interesting or relevant, and that will create points of entry for art historians as well as someone who has never before considered art."
The artist has shown her work in galleries and museums the world over, including, among others, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (USA), the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art (Istanbul), the Denver Art Museum (USA), Collection le Consortium (Dijon, France), La Colección Jumex (México), the Essl Collection (Klosterneuburg/Vienna), and Valencia Arte Contemporáneo (Spain). Lisa Ruyter has had more than twenty-five solo exhibitions in leading galleries around the world, and, in 2008, solo shows will be presented in Paris, Tokyo and Vienna. Her work has also been seen in numerous group shows and at international art fairs.