Ruti de Vries

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

I like to think of my practice as an ever-expanding spiral, incessantly gathering new motives and materials to form an enigmatic mythology that keeps haunting my works, drawing equally from ancient, indigenous, and outsider art, as from the worlds of fashion, puppetry, and theater. I work quickly and intuitively, letting my hands lead the way, oscillating between obsessive laboring and immediate expressiveness. My makeshift, flimsy, sculptures are made from cheap materials. They offer only a shell of a structure, an eviscerated presence. These bric-à-brac taxidermies populate stage-like environments, where time seems to have freezed just in the midst of things, leaving us with a silent choreography of suspended gestures and charged feelings. In these fragmented yet meticulously constructed limbos, distinctions between human and animal, masculine and feminine, organic and artificial, dissolve. Through my use of different crafts, I explore issues of gender, labor, and creative hierarchies, as well as the cultural structures of kitsch and melodrama. Ornamentation, patterns and symmetry, all highly characteristic of craft, take center stage, and contribute to a constant tension between two-dimensionality and volume, the graphic and the sculptural, sign and presence.

Artwork