The art world preferred to forget Sibylle Ruppert for most of her life (1942-2011); the rediscovery came after her death. A Frankfurt painter trained at the Städelschule, she chose art over a dancing career and, once settled in Paris, made the large-format charcoal drawings she’s now known for: bodies that grapple and bleed into one another until the line between human, animal and machine gives way.
She is usually summed up as biomechanical surrealism, dark eroticism, a friend of H.R. Giger. None of it gets past the skin. But her own reckoning with the inside ran deeper. She once described a figure cutting through its own skin only to hit metal, armor that protects and, in protecting, seals the feeling in. The infernal surface is a report from an interior.
Where Giger’s biomechanics reached the mainstream through Alien, Ruppert’s creatures belonged to no current at all — too crude, too peculiar. She spent her last working years teaching drawing in prisons and psychiatric clinics, then withdrew, ill, into a Paris seclusion she never left.
Painting or drawing is a form of conversation with oneself. It is a solitary relationship with his or her own intimate world. It is a work that makes people aware of their fundamental loneliness.Sibylle Ruppert
