Ulrich RückriemSkulpturale Grafik – Grafische Skulptur

In 2008 Ulrich Rückriem donated a large mural to the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, having previously handed over his extensive work archive to the university’s art collections. The scholarly appraisal of this donation has now been completed. The publication now appearing sets out to introduce the unknown Ulrich Rückriem, namely the draughtsman. Born in Düsseldorf in 1938 and living today in Cologne and London, the sculptor and emeritus academy teacher, who taught in Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt/Main, is regarded as an outstanding exponent of a minimalist and conceptual understanding of sculpture. At the centre of the publication are therefore his works on paper, the “Gebundene” and ”Freie Figurationen” as well as his “Kosmen,” which describe a charged relationship of tension between monolithic sculpture and weightless drawing. It also clarifies the causes, immanent in the work itself, of the shift of emphasis from sculpture to drawing, which presupposes an analysis of the relationship of sculpture to functional as well as autonomous drawing. In this connection the fundamental question of materiality in Rückriem’s work is also addressed. For it is above all the sketches, drawings and models preserved in the archive at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in which the genesis of individual sculptures as well as the emergence of entire ensembles of works becomes visible. The book presents the artist’s archive by means of numerous reproductions of hitherto little-known and scarcely published drawings and thus provides entirely new insights into the work of Ulrich Rückriem. The author of this publication is Dorothee Böhm, who as academic director looks after the “Archiv Ulrich Rückriem” at the Institute of Art History of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.