Sibylle Ruppert
1942, Frankfurt — 2011, Paris

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 during an air raid on September 8th, 1942. It was the night of the first massive bombing of Frankfurt during World War II. In 1959, at the age of 17, Sibylle was admitted to the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Shortly after, she left for Paris, where she enrolled in a ballet school. During a visit to New York, she decided to give up her dancing career, returned to Europe and became a full-time artist. 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 all characterized by an extremely detailed and elaborate depiction. Her oeuvre is inspired by the morbid and obscene writings of Marquis de Sade, Lautréamont and Georges Bataille. As well as 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Sibylle Ruppert died in 2011, withdrawn from any social and public life.

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