Berlin-based Bernd Ribbeck’s substantial collection of new work demonstrates the rarely exercised inspirational potential of painting. In the gallery’s high-ceilinged main space, the connotations of Ribbeck’s early-twentieth-century architectural influences seem justified and relevant. The gallery’s volume extends the iconoclastically abstract circular and diagonal compositions beyond token references to twentieth-century examples by Klee or Kandinsky. Made on MDF surfaces, symmetrical ballpoint-pen drawing underlies asymmetrical patterns created by rich, dirty washes of acrylic, in modestly sized untitled works that remain contained as individual pieces yet simultaneously expand in a lyric dialogue with one another that saturates the gallery. Occasionally figurative, and in instances resembling a face or a set of cartoon eyes, Ribbeck’s renderings appear light and challenging to the earnest legacy of geometric abstraction.
In the smaller adjacent gallery, similarly sized, framed works, almost all made on paper, are hung on purple and blue walls. Here the artist’s relationship with the space is reversed: Where the MDF works’ philosophical concerns unpack beyond their borders, these pieces appear to be consumed by their surroundings. The artist’s approach is softer, the washes of paint milkier, and although confidently executed, the art appear passive and with less need for interpretation. The sketchlike qualities of the pen drawings, significant to both the MDF paintings and paper works, are most apparent in the latter, and although his art is clearly defined by media, Ribbeck’s patterned surfaces combine restraint and expression in a way that ultimately records the murky and sometimes sinister workings of the artist’s mind with vivid candor.
