Allen Ruppersberg
Biography
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, 1944
Lives and works in New York and Los Angeles, USA
Ruppersberg graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1967. He began as a painter but quickly abandoned oil and canvas in favor of projects that were about language, pictures, books, and ideas. His love for images and texts led him to gather thousands of books, postcards, photographs, magazines, slides, posters, and a large collections of industrial and educational films from 1931-1967. For an artist interested in the cultural mythologies, narratives, and common truths of everyday life, this collection of materials, featuring mostly items from American popular culture of the mid 20th century, has frequently served as fertile source material in his work. Together with John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler or Lawrence Weiner Ruppersberg belongs to the first generation of American Conceptual artists that changed the way art was thought about.
Selected Texts
- 2018Leah OllmanArt in America
- 2013Brian BoucherArt in America
- 2011Andrew BerardiniMousse
- 2010Matias ViegenerX-TRA
- 2010Catherine TaftArtforum
- 2008Coline MillardAfterall
- 2007Tim GriffinArtforum
- 2005Steven SternFrieze
Exhibitions
- 27 September — 16 November 2019
“If you live long enough you begin to see
the endings of the things in which you saw the beginnings”
Allen RuppersbergLos Angeles was the city of Allen Ruppersberg’s beginnings in the late 1960’s. He graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute (later Cal Arts) in 1967 and had his first solo exhibition at the legendary Eugenia Butler gallery in 1969. This same year he attracted wide critical attention when he opened Al’s Café. When Harald Szeemann invited him to participate in Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, and then included him in Documenta 5 three years later, Ruppersberg’s stature as a young conceptual artist was established. All along five decades, Ruppersberg has developed his unique voice in conceptual art. He is an avid collector, a vernacular anthropologist that has spent years amassing an immense trove of postcards, educational films, magazines, posters, comic books, obituaries, newspaper clippings, records, objects and ephemera of all sorts. This archive serves as a regular resource for the artist, who tirelessly draws, copies, classifies, rearranges and recycles elements in the making of his works. As he himself has stated: “The idea of rearranging my life and the work is an ongoing subject.” Language is a key element in Ruppersberg work.
- 03 May — 27 July 2013
- 01—28 February 2023
- 30 August — 17 September 2016
News
- 28 June — 18 August 2019
GROUP SHOW: SWISS INSTITUTE, NEW YORK
- 24 May — 7 September 2019
GROUP SHOW: McEVOY FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS, SAN FRANCISCO
- 17 May — 21 July 2019
GROUP SHOW: KUNSTVEREIN HAMBURG
- 10 February — 12 May 2019
SOLO SHOW: HAMMER MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES
- 17 November 2018 — 27 January 2019
GROUP SHOW, MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CHICAGO
- 14 July — 30 September 2018
Group Show, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art