Kathy Ruttenberg: Illusions From A Daydream
Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Kathy Ruttenberg Illusions From A Daydream on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd from June 29 through August 17. This is Ruttenberg’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and will feature all new ceramic sculptures. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, June 29 from 5-8 pm.
Opening the door to her inner self, Kathy Ruttenberg’s suite of ceramic pots, vases, and vessels express a deep connection to the earth (her material) and nature (her subject). Testing the limits of “functional ware,” flowers, branches, women, men, amphibia, insects, cats, and rabbits all protrude from her sculptures. Narrative and allegory flow from the hands of the artist: personal stories and private daydreams reflect on themes of ecofeminism, animal liberation, and sexuality.
For Illusions From A Daydream, Ruttenberg selected living matter—non rooting plants and branches—to display in her ceramics. A female figure in Biophilia, lays submerged in water; surrounded by water lilies, recalling John Everett Millais’s singing Ophelia, she captures the ecstatic energy and illimitable power of nature in bloom. Ruttenberg embraces duality, the porousness of categories: functional, decorative, organic, animalic. In her anthropomorphic vision, animals express an equivalent depth of emotion and personality to human subjects. Hallucinatory and surreal, It’s All in the Minddepicts the body of a woman with the head of a giraffe, defying naturalism and heightening a sense of nightmarish harmony.
Richly detailed, Ruttenberg’s tableaux are an ode to environmentalism, paganism, and fairy tales. She melds a fanciful interior world with our vital natural one, giving equal attention to grand narratives and the tiniest crevices. Her vision of the body as form and mind as an open vessel raise questions about existence, creation, myth, and the complexities of self-knowledge. Bursting with life, light, and an unbridled wildness, Ruttenberg’s forest of beasts, creatures, hybrids, and humans, part the veil of reality to a fluid world of fantasy.
Kathy Ruttenberg (b. Chicago, IL) received a BFA with honors from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY. Subsequently, Ruttenberg studied at the School of Visual Arts, Tangier, Morocco and the New York University Graduate Program, Venice Italy. Emerging from New York’s early 1980s East Village art scene, Ruttenberg showed her work at diverse downtown venues including the Mudd Club, ABC No Rio, and the windows of Patricia Field’s fashion boutique. Participation in a 1998 ceramics class at the famous Greenwich House Pottery resulted in two decades of creations in clay that have been exhibited at venues throughout the world including Stefan Stux Gallery, New York, NY; Slademore Contemporary, London, UK; the Dubuque Museum of Art, Iowa; the Caramoor Center for Music and Art, New York, NY; the International Ceramic Biennial, Vallauris, France; the 5th World Ceramic Biennale Korea; and the 59th Faenza Price International Competition of Contemporary Ceramic Art, Italy.
Ruttenberg’s sculpture works are permanently installed at several public sites including Passage to Potential, a bronze entrance gate to an organic garden at Battery Park, New York City, NY; In Dreams Awake, at The Broadway Malls, New York City, NY; Mamiraua Sustainable Development Reserve, Amazonas, Brazil; and the Tisch Children’s Zoo in Central Park, New York City, NY. Ruttenberg has presented over forty solo shows throughout her career, most recently Twilight in the Garden of Hope at Lyles and King, New York, NY. Ruttenberg lives and works in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York.