Sibylle Ruppert

German artist Sibylle Ruppert created a radical oeuvre of paintings, drawings and collages throughout the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s in a brutal aesthetic between dark surrealism, eroticism and an intimate but fierce processing of her own private traumas.

Ruppert was born on September 8th, 1942, during an air raid on the night of the first massive bombing of Frankfurt in World War II. In 1959, at the age of 17, she was admitted to the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Shortly after, Ruppert moved to Paris, to train as a ballet dancer, but a transformative visit to New York led her to give up her dance career, and return to Europe to pursue art full-time.

In the 80’s she started giving art classes in prisons, mental hospitals, and drug addiction rehabilitation centers. Her large-format charcoal drawings and etchings are marked by extraordinary detail and elaborate depiction, inspired by the morbid and obscene writings of Marquis de Sade, Lautréamont and Georges Bataille.

Beyond the literary influences cited above visual traces and echoes can be observed of Hieronymus Bosch, H.R. Giger, Henry Fuseli, Hans Bellmer, William Blake and Francis Bacon, though this does not in any way detract from her singularly visceral and kinetic imagination.

In her surrealistic works, the bodily depictions are always in motion; writhing, straining, collapsing, and seemingly undergoing a monstrous transformation from human anatomies into distorted masses of abstract shape. Sibylle Ruppert passed away in 2011, having spent her later years withdrawn from social and public life.