Art Basel Paris
Sibylle Ruppert

For Art Basel Paris, Blue Velvet presents a solo booth dedicated to Sibylle Ruppert (1942–2011), bringing together a group of works that have never previously been exhibited or offered on the market. At the center of the presentation is Curval (1976), one of the most important works of Ruppert’s career, alongside a small selection of previously unseen works that further reveal the intensity and singularity of her practice.

Sibylle Ruppert was a German artist whose radical oeuvre of paintings, drawings, and collages developed primarily from the 1960s through the 1980s. Her work is characterized by a brutal aesthetic that merges dark surrealism and eroticism, often using the body as a site of psychological tension, transformation, and excess.

Born on September 7, 1942, in Frankfurt during a devastating World War II air raid, Ruppert’s early life was marked by turmoil. At 17, she was admitted to the Städelschule in Frankfurt. She later moved to Paris to study ballet but ultimately abandoned dance to fully commit to her art. Throughout the 1980s, Ruppert also taught art in prisons, mental hospitals, and drug rehabilitation centers.

Ruppert’s charcoal drawings and paintings are distinguished by meticulous detail and elaborate depictions of an eclectic fantasy. Her work draws inspiration from the morbid and obscene writings of Marquis de Sade, Lautréamont, and Georges Bataille, as well as visual influences from artists such as Hieronymus Bosch, Henry Fuseli, Hans Bellmer, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, William Blake, and Michelangelo — whose heavily shaded musculature echoes in her tormented figures.

Her surrealistic compositions often portray bodies in dynamic states — writhing, straining, collapsing — seemingly undergoing monstrous transformations from human anatomies into amorphous masses. References to eroticism and violence oscillate between the explicit and the stylized, with flailing limbs, engorged veins, and contorted flesh rendered with manneristic precision. Her creatures, hybrids of the abject and the hallucinatory, push surrealism into its most unrelenting and extreme manifestations.

Blue Velvet has been committed to bringing renewed attention to Ruppert’s work and introducing her singular practice to wider public and critical audiences. This engagement culminated in the 2022 exhibition Sibylle Ruppert: The Bible of Evil, which brought together more than 30 works spanning her career.

The Art Basel Paris presentation builds on this ongoing engagement while introducing a distinct group of works that has remained outside public view and the market until now. With Curval (1976) at its center, the presentation brings renewed attention to the force and singularity of Ruppert’s visual language and to a practice that remains strikingly underrecognized.