Allen Ruppersberg’s striking first solo exhibition at Mai 36 Galerie hints at his key themes:
Movement between places, presence and absence, the book as object and subject, memorials and self-portraits. It also reveals his reverence for cultural forms “destined to disappear,” narratives ranging from postcards and wall calendars to hand-painted signs.
Perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, Ruppersberg brought out the nuances of culture through its visual details, unsung conventions, and forms of the everyday, often encouraging the inclusion of the viewer as a social participant, an aspect of his work that has led him to become one of the first generation of American conceptual artists that was ahead of its time and changed the way art was thought about and made and eventually inspired numerous subsequent generations of artists.
‘It had to unfold gradually so that the common themes and ideas would naturally reveal themselves, just as one story generates another.’ - Allen Ruppersberg