Lisa Ruyter Studio
Timothy Hartley Smith
Administrative Manager
PO Box 20224
New York NY 10011 USA
+1.212.643.1520 tel
+1.866.808.6581 fax
tim@lisaruyter.com
General Inquiries
info@lisaruyter.com
Sales
The Breeder
ATHENS
www.thebreedersystem.com
Taka Ishii Gallery
TOKYO
www.takaishiigallery.com
Georg Kargl
VIENNA
www.georgkargl.com
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
SALZBURG/PARIS
www.ropac.net
Lisa Ruyter, an American, 40, lives and works in Vienna. 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 scenes for her own consumption. Ruyter then selects a small percentage of these pictures and begins the process of fixing them in the medium of painting. She "transcribes" the photographs onto the picture plane, selects the areas of the image that she wishes to render, leaving out details she thinks 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 is in the way she takes on seemingly ordinary images and makes them extraordinary. What at first appear simple but giant paint-by-number works slowly reveal themselves to be complex arrangements of flat colors with poignant, powerful subject matter. The effect freezes the narrative and pushes it toward abstraction. Ruyter titles her paintings after films, though any relation of the title to the subject matter is incidental.
Whether she is painting crowds, party scenes, fashion models swaying down the catwalk, trees, Greek island landscapes or meetings of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ruyter's need to document the world around her in this neutral middle distance where the viewer is both there and not 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. Her work has been seen in numerous group shows and at international art fairs.