Lisa Ruyter

Since 1996, Lisa Ruyter's paintings have been based on individual photographs taken by the artist and have formed a map of her movements around the globe as well as her personal development. Ruyter 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 drawing is in place, Ruyter begins to map out colors within the structure of that drawing. The final fixing of the images occurs when Ruyter, usually in a single sitting, redraws the lines with a paint pen, bringing the image into sharp focus. The power of Ruyters 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, and highlights potential subtexts.

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 Atoms for Peace in 2008/09 was her third solo show at Georg Kargl Fine Arts after 2001 and 2003.