26.10.-22.11.03

As an artist Ruth Buck moves in different mediums. Car paint images, photography, text and sound works stand thereby equally side-by-side. The actual exhibition in the gallery Bernhard Bischoff presents the different facets – all of them with new works.

«Hirn Rinde» is written in big letters in the corridor and confuses with the wilful composition of two autonomous words, which produce in combination again another word, one of the human anatomy.

Buck started a long time ago to project oversized word combinations on façades as for example «Hoden Sack», «Mutter Mund» or «Stirn Lappen» and to produce confusion with this simple form of lyric. Now she shows a work from the series for the first time as a wall painting.

The in Montreal originated photo performance «Blinde Date» tie on the series of photo performances, which has started with «Mountaining in Bed». Buck, as an unobtrusive protagonist plays with her surroundings- now in «Blinde Date» with a slightly transparent curtain. Insights, vista and assumption characterise the scenery. The sequence of 12 pictures as large diapositives in luminosity becomes a kind of movie, a fleeting vision of longings.

Car paint pictures take a central position in Bucks work. By use of the «papier mâché» technique glued white single sheets, which result in a several millimetres thick paper board, composed in such a way the painting ground, developed in long collecting processes of the artist the painting ground. Already early Buck began showing several pictures in shape of a tile. Now she has refined this way of presentation. Always 5-8 works of the same size are declared a unity.

Depending on the space, the succession of the colours on the pile change. The spectators have the possibility, to constantly change the succession, to unfix single pictures from the pile and distribute in the room. Recently the piles carry the title «Playmobiles», to underline the playful aspect in commerce with them. The «Plates» are a last shape of car paint pictures. Circular they lie on the ground; with glimmering surfaces they become imaginative ponds of indefinable depth. The abstract landscape of the «normal» rectangular pictures of Buck, become an installed conversion of the theme while circularly lying on the ground. All car paint pictures have a strong haptic component in resemblance. Next to the visual game of changes, the works are really longing for a touch. The works are made a sensual surface for projections, which one caresses in concealment or in the public; again and again exhibition visitors have been caught doing it.

Niagara falls sough in the loo. «Dislocation» is one of the numerous sound installations, which Buck often placed at special locations to amaze spectators and hearers. Places will be onomatopoetically alternated and in such ways put into a new context.

Since the last exhibition in the past year, the floor painting «Elephant» can e found on the patio – and the huge animal still helpfully shows the way across the Alps…

Bernhard Bischoff, October 2003