Ruti De Vries at Fireflies

Artist: Ruti De Vries

Exhibition title: Faces

Venue: Fireflies (online exhibition)

Date: November 27, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist

Looking at me looking at you, looking at you looking at me, my nose touch your back, you’re looking away, were all looking over there, they are looking at us, we are looking at them

FACES is a new 2021 limited-edition calendar created and published by Ruti de Vries.

It is the fifth time in a row that de Vries publishes an art calendar.

De Vries’ artistic work is influenced by ancient art, folklore, outsider art, and from the worlds of fashion, puppetry and theater. In her intricate lexicon of images and materials she dissolves the distinctions between the human and the animal, feminine and masculine, organic and artificial.

Through the use of different crafts, de Vries explores issues of gender, labor, and creative hierarchies, as well as the structures of kitsch, melodrama and “bad taste”. Ornamentation, patterns, symmetry, repetition, all highly characteristic of craft, take center stage in her work creating a continues tension between two-dimensionality and volume, between the graphic and the sculptural, between signs and presence.

For the past five years working on the art calendar has become a ritual for de Vries. Through this project, she has the chance to work on an actual product, one that is purposeful and useful, which allows her to extend beyond her studio work and develop another creative direction.

2021 calendar consists of faces. Each face is in a profile, looking at one another or at the horizon. Thinking about the current global situation, the idea of creating a figure, a face, a glance, now forced to hide behind a facial mask, holds a special meaning. The faces, made of flat color fields, at times surface from the background and at others fade out.

For the online launch of the calendar, de Vries decided to illustrate an environment for it, ‘a simulation’, a sort of a PR / marketing conduct. She asked her close friends to send her photos of their favorite place at home. There, she embedded her calendar, having in mind that these homes have become the center of our lives and represent space in the present period. The series ‘Faces of Homes’ has the same pictorial language as the calendar’s.