Lisa Ruyter

Based on photographs, Lisa Ruyter’s paintings of parties, fashion events, and street scenes are executed in a Pop art style of bright, flat colors with black outlines. Non-naturalistic colors, details reduced to thick lines, and flattened space push indexical photographic images toward abstraction. Ruyter is interested in the nature of an archive, appropriation strategies, and the fugitive qualities of color in relationship to history.

In her Let us now Praise Famous Men (2012) series of acrylic paintings, Ruyter appropriated Depression-era black and white photographs from the archive of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information in the Library of Congress. Adhering to the compositions of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, the artist re-colored sections in fantastic neons–orange for a face or lime green for a shirt.  Ruyter explains, “These images, produced through government agency quite miraculously transcend propaganda, and have become the material of an American identity. It is a defining and generative archive, ever more so as it is digitized, repeated and further disseminated.” By altering such iconic imagery Ruyter plays on the subjectivity of identity construction. The artist mediates the memories that fill our experiential reality thus creating an alternate but equal reality of her own. Whether an iconic image, landscape, or crowd scene, she uses color in a disruptive manner, emphasizing the inherently abstract nature of any representation.

Ruyter’s work has been included in numerous international museum exhibitions including the Museum of Modern Art, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Schirn Kunsthalle in Germany, the Abbaye Saint-Andre Center d’lart contemporain in France, and Whitney Museum of American Art.