Bernard Ridiger

Bernard Ridiger

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Bernhard Rüdiger was born in Italy, (Rome, 1964), and lives and works in Paris. He graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan with Luciano Fabro, and teaches today in Lyon where he directs the research programm Contemporary Art and historical temporalities. Since 1986, he has taken part in many group shows (Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea Milan 1989, 1998, Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato 1990, 1998, Museum Moderner Kunst Vienna 1991, Magasin de Grenoble 1992, Contemporary Art Museum Caracas, Bogota and Buenos Aires 1992, the Venice Biennale 1993, 1999, 2011, the Rome Quadriennale Palazzo delle Esposizioni 1996, 2008, PS1 New-York 1999, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille 2006, Ostrale Dresden 2013, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel 2013, Museion Bolzano 2014, Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri Città di Castello 2015, Triennale Milan, Ennesima 2015) and solo exhibitions (Christian Stein Gallery Turin and Milan, Michel Rein Gallery Tours and Paris, Krings-Ernst Gallery Colone, Traversée zeitgenössische Kunst Munich, Bernard Bouche Gallery Paris, GDM… Paris and in the Centre de Création Contemporaine, Tours 1996, les Abattoirs de Toulouse 1997, Centre d’art La Galerie de Noisy-le-Sec 1999, Museo d’arte moderna di Bologna 1999, Château des Adhémar centre d’art contemporain Montélimar 2006, FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon and ESBAMA de Montpellier 2015). He was editor of the magazine Tiracorrendo and co-founder of the artists’ gallery Lo Spazio di Via Lazzaro Palazzi, a busy venue in the Milan art scene from 1989 to 1993. Bernhard Rüdiger’s works confront visitors with a physical experience involving object, body and space. At once sculptures, monumental models and architectures, through their meticulous spatial and acoustic arrangement, his works seek to make history ring out, and in particular the history of places

Text from catalogue – …A professor, researcher, and artist of great gesture, of German-Italian origin, Bernhard Rüdiger says that he is not French even though he has been living, working, and teaching at the University of Lyon in France for three decades. In his work, everything is perfect, starting with the execution, through planning and researching the issues he deals with – and these are primarily empty spaces and duplicates, that is, what he calls two points of view. The artist believes that the object cannot function by itself and that it needs a partner. At the Terra Symposium, he created two twin series of works of bells and representations of asteroids titled Gaspra, which he also translated into a monumental format. The monumental work was made in a combination of terracotta and steel, based on a 3D drawing model, in a 1:1 ratio and is dedicated to asteroid number 951 in the classification of elements that fly in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. The method of working with double models helps the artist to understand himself, in the same way that the works “understand” each other. On the other hand, he has been dealing with bells since 2004 and they form a significant part of his creativity. The archaic sound of the bell, with a wide range of essential meaning, is associated with the announcement of danger, the announcement of death, the performance of rituals, happiness, life in its fullness and complexity. The artist connected the work on the bells in Kikinda with the idea of using the sedimentary soil of the Pannonian Basin. Producing bells from that deposited clay, he reflects on recent history and all the changes that have befallen the inhabitants of this pan-European plain in the past two hundred years.

Verica Nemet