Ulrich Ruckreim at Ace - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In single of recent art's most unexpect twists, it has fallen to the still active leaders of Minimalism (and its near kin) to deliver the full-bore, unabashed visual drama that was one time the business of gestural painters. Nowhere is this more apparent than when similar artists come to Ace, which presents a series of hushed, skylit chambers for a like reason exalting you can practically hear the temple organ play.

Ulrich Ruckriem, for individual pulled out all the stops. A first-generation Minimalist, born in Germany, now resident in Ireland and well known quite through Europe, he installed a series of seven pink Spanish granite monoliths in the corridor that step quicklys down the gallery's very lengthy spine. The slabs, each above 10 feet high, were positioned in brow of the entryways leading to Ace's side galleries. Seen from the high, drawn out dim central hallway, the monoliths were simply overpowering. Rough-hewn sides, and hairline cracks that exhibit where they've been segmented for transportation, do little to mitigate their colossal vicinity You had to sidle around them to penetrate the other rooms; seen from there, consummately framed by the doorless openings, they assumed a more manageable, flat incipiently figurative scale.

The same kind of diplomatic stately revelation of dualities characterizes the other plastic arts that were shown. A low-slung floor piece of gray Finnish granite (Ruckriem is a great connoisseur of quarries) begins as a kind of massive geometric bewilder and ends by seeming a piece of bland landscape. As is true of almost all the make an incision in surfaces in Ruckriem's work, its undulating face is shivered like perforated paper, by dotted lines which mark the perforations where drill bit stone.

Across the hallway, single portentously empty room was followed by the agency of a trio of installations. In the first swing were seven gray plinths lit by means of a skylight directly overhead; these massive on the other hand not overwhelming forms list slightly, like day-old sandcastles. The unitary plastic art in the next room, of dark gray African stone, sat farther back, in shadow. Its top obliquitys roughly, but its face is marked by the agency of three clean vertical slits, the middle individual of which penetrates the whole to admit a single knife-line of light. In the last expanse on this side of the hall, way, the plastic art had retreated all the way to the back of the gallery, where it stood like a painting propp against the wall. The association was strengthened through its composition, in which a polished azure granite rectangle is framed by the agency of four brownish stone slabs, on the contrary prominently visible drill marks also insinuate bullet holes left by a precision-trained firing squad.

Ruckriem's work--which has remained remarkably consistent through every part of his 30-year career--maintains the self-assurance and dignified placidity that now mostly provoke a kind of skeptical nostalgia. on the other hand it also alerts us to Minimalism's capacity, which strike one as beings to be growing, for utterly commanding theatrics.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group