The genesis of this co-curation about shoes with the Van der Grinten Galerie was the visit Franz and I made in 2021 to the Cologne Art Fair, where we fell in love with the macabre pencil drawings of Rudolf Schlichter. One depicted a man’s Oxford shoes, a suggestion of his trousers, and an unmistakable shadow under those shoes that revealed the subject matter to be a hanging man. Provocative and irresistible, it immediately inspired us to find other works that touched on that mystery.

I think we have created a very interesting “Euro-American” mélange and, though I can only speak with any authority about the works that I have chosen, I am delighted that we have such a wide range of media – from watercolor and antique prints to a digital sculpture built by a 3-D printer; a ballpoint ink on linen drawing penned by a famous San Francisco woman tattooist; the toile de Jouy embroidery of Richard Saja; the true-to-life model of a French frigate by Australian artist Timothy Horn; Yvetta Fedorova’s wonderful cut paper lady’s boot; a velvet upholstered boot by Janet Stein from Barcelona; and Robert Fontanelli’s inventive modernist chairs- cum-shoes, modeled and photographed. As for the odd finds I accumulated at flea markets in New York and in Mexico City, I’m infatuated with them all: the early 20th century momento mori box containing the funeral trappings of black shoes, black hat and veil, a real hairpiece, and the tintype that shows our wearer in all the parts. The Mexican shoeshine box, which I reduced down to its lid and clasp. The watercolor on pulp paper of a Chinese cobbler, a very rare survivor of the practice of wrapping goods in these original watercolors to attract Western buyers. Warhol’s contribution speaks for itself and it was, in fact, his 1950’s commercial shoe illustrations that first drew attention to him as a great artist. The inclusion in this show of two collages by Antonio Lopez on his Carnegie Hall stationery might, however, require some background. Antonio Lopez, working with his creative collaborator Juan Ramos, was one of the most eminent fashion illustrators of his time. From the early 1960’s until his death in 1987, he and Juan worked primarily in New York and Paris. They were known for their avant-garde approach to illustration, which included models of color, art historical motifs and queer subculture. If you were around at that time, you knew the work.

There are numerous aspects to that small necessity that we all know, all possess, cannot move without. I count five: architecture, fantasy/fashion, humility/utility, theatricality and bearing witness. The later is shown most directly in the video by Deborah Luster, who has for a long time photographed inmates at Louisiana’s infamous Angola prison. In her piece we see a man grabbing a moment of independence in a pair of tap shoes borrowed for the occasion. I call that: being a witness. Sasha Brodsky employed an entirely different means in his watercolor of a deceased friend’s boots on the tiled floor of his Roman flat, yet here, too, we are allowed to bear witness – to his memory at work. A combination witness/fantasist with a definite nod to architecture, New York artist and photo editor Scott Teplin was struck by a photograph of a car crash with one lone shoe out on the street. So he made a multi-part mountain of that shoe that echoes the auto wreck. The poet Max Blagg created a poem for the show and typed it, at my insistance, within the shape of a woman’s pump, then also had the good manners to create a German rendition. Colette Robbins’ extraordinary archaic-looking monument is digitally printed yet implies ancient civilizations. Justen Ladda, a German artist who has long lived on New York’s Lower East Side, used his prodigious skills to create a piece with a three-dimensional quality, picturing medieval sabatons. Too many wonderful and inventive works to write about here.

I hope you enjoy and are touched by our efforts.

Ruth Marten, September 20, 2022, NYC

The Moon’s Mirror is the fourth Ruth Marten solo exhibition at the Van der Grinten Galerie, and we are thrilled that the New York artist will be coming to Cologne to attend the opening in person’.

The period from the spring of 2020 up through summer of this year was an unnerving and extraordinarily challenging time – certainly a major watershed for us all. In New York City, where Ruth Martens lives and works, the situation was extremely dramatic from the start – seeming at times insurmountable. Though contact with friends and associates near and far was maintained by phone and all manner of digital technology, otherwise there was nothing for it but to explore the accumulated strata of one’s own space: opening long-closed boxes and books, binders, folders and portfolios, rediscovering and reenergizing everything down to the tiniest piece of paper in the process.

About her experience of this time Ruth Marten writes: “While living in enforced solitude, I nonetheless felt very connected to my community and the lives we had invented together. The phenomenon of connectivity played out in the drawings and I was surprised to see how the ‘devices’ reminded me of perpetual motion machines. Also, some pictures are jammed with information while others are quite barren. I love these children equally and try to be sensitive to their hatching.“

The works on paper were created in an ongoing process of alternation, and they form a very diverse group – explosive and microscopic; enigmatic and in-your-face; vulnerable and ferocious; at times somber, but nevertheless pulsating with irrepressible humor.

Thinking back to the Ruth Marten retrospective in 2018-2019 at the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl we recall the astounding’ insight it gave into the artist’s multifaceted 40-year-plus oeuvre. Now, surrounded by these latest works, we experience them as a progression of the dynamics of Ruth Marten’s artistic journey.

In the exhibition ‘The Moon’s Mirror’ we are again treated to the familiar spectrum of Marten’s compelling technique – India ink, aquarelle, gouache, collage, the use of 18^th century prints and 19^th and early 20^th century photographs. So it is all the more exciting to see the broad scope of expression that this single group of works encompasses: some of the pictures display surreal, puzzling-poetic scenarios that offer a wonderful launchpad for flights of fancy. An example: targeted interventions made on old small-format photo portraits gives rise to an inimitable Surrealist portrait gallery à la mode Ruth Marten. Another portion of the work group is on a different quest, striving for the liberation that comes of basting through and obliterating the compositional comfort zone. These are ultra-reduced compositions with sparse ink-drawn or collaged creations that float, almost like foreign bodies, across the empty field of paper. Balance is maintained by sheer dint of artistic instinct. In contrast, other works are laden with layers of paint and other elements, venturing a bold mosaic-like mixture of the abstract and the figurative that demands careful contemplation.

The work of Ruth Martens is represented in numerous private and institutional collections in Europe and North America.

In 2013, the VAN DER GRINTEN GALERIE first began representing the work of artist RUTH MARTEN, a native New Yorker born in 1949. Since then, the gallery has presented and promoted her work in multiple solo and group exhibitions, as well as book publications and special editions. Last year’s RUTH MARTEN retrospective ‘Dream Lover’ at the LVR Max Ernst Museum in Brühl met with critical acclaim and broad public appeal. Her work has now also been successfully placed in numerous private collections, institutions and museums. All of this is a gratifying response to our efforts of recent years, confirming our high regard for the artist and her oeuvre.

In the upcoming solo show ‘Afterlife, My 20th Century’ the Van der Grinten Galerie will proudly present the latest ensemble of RUTH MARTEN works, from 22 November 2019 to 01 February 2020.

At the opening of the Brühl retrospective, which the artist herself regarded as an important review of her life’s work to date, RUTH MARTEN had already expressed the desire to begin a new work cycle. This time, the basis of her acutely observed and executed, often astonishing drawing and collage interventions would not be 18^th and 19^th century prints but old photographs, vintage late 19^th century to late 1940s.

Viewing these new works – created between the fall of 2018 and the summer of 2019 – one is immediately struck by their relatively large format (up to 70 x 90 cm). While RUTH MARTEN is known for her body of small-format works, which play with and build on the characteristics of their print/illustration “grounding”, the latest cycle represents a departure, as the artist turns her attentions to an exploration of painterly possibilities. Found historical photographs are partially painted over then copied, enlarged and again subjected to painterly interventions.

Old photos by the boxful: images of thousands of nameless souls whose unknown origins will forever remain a mystery. Betrayed by the promise of photography to stop the march of time in its tracks and surmount death, all of them are now long dead and forgotten, until RUTH MARTEN’s paintbrush reawakens them to new life  – an “afterlife”. The artist says she wanted to emphasize the “drama”. She was fascinated by the paradox between the stiff poses and touching earnestness with which the subjects stood as they left their “last testament” for posterity, firm in the faith it would last forever, and the melancholy reality of the vanitas slumbering within us all. With her interventions – covering and concealing with new colored layers, but also adding her own painted elements – RUTH MARTEN transforms the basis work. Sometimes her approach is radical, removing so much of the original visual information that almost none of it remains to be seen. Here, the many new empty patches create the space for a new beginning. The composition and focal points of the image are completely redefined, making way for fresh interpretations. A chance to be resurrected from the void, to regain significance: in portraits the faces have disappeared (Men’s Furnishings, Elemental, Oracle…); in full body photographs whole sections of bodies and the surrounding setting, and sometimes even the whole head of the original subjects have vanished (The Power of the Pearl, Blue Vessel). What remains are people without faces, blind windows, energy-charged objects, completely disembodied hair, beards and eyes simply suspended in the nothingness of the empty page: many nods to the artist’s signature obsessions, familiar from earlier works.

This new cycle, surprisingly different yet at once utterly typical of the RUTH MARTEN universe, once again draws the viewer into a mysterious world full of conundrums. Despite the full compliment of trademark Ruth Marten humor, here the artist also weaves a dark undertone into the poetic landscape of the works. And leaves us to ponder all the interpretive possibilities for ourselves.

“DRAWING IS THE PASSION BEHIND IT ALL”

Serendipity has dictated all my choices in the collages I’ve made since 2006. As I am an absolute dictator in my manual manipulations, I thought it wise to give over to emotion and attraction when first contemplating a new picture. That I often hide my hand within the print’s vernacular doesn’t concern me as I am disciplined and bullheaded enough to extend the fantasy to the bitter end, thus making it more completely my own.

My first purchase of the print that was the genesis of FOUNTAINS & ALLIGATORS was bought on New York’s Upper West Side at a Sunday flea market. This tiny, foxed, delicate print, “497” was etched in 1808 before the advent of lithography and mass publishing. It came from a book entitled “Costume Parisien”, one of the earliest fashion magazines, hardcover. I found dozens more in the archives of Argosy Book & Print Shop spanning the years 1808 to the Victorian era with its grotesque ornamentation and obvious vow to leave no garment unadorned. My people wore Empire style, with its connection to Napoleon and classical Greek lines, exuding an air of sensible modernity. The spareness within the rectangle they inhabited easily allowed for my additions, and the modesty of the poses allowed me to turn them into gushing fountains or force crocodilian cohabitation upon them. Interesting also were the attitudes they took; apparently it was altogether natural at the beginning of the 19th century to strike a pose of lamentation. One can easily imagine the ravages of high childhood mortality and young widowhood through warfare and illness. Those pages were a primer on funereal garb.

Perhaps these well-to-do Parisians were even waiting for my interventions? It became an opportunity to animate and amplify any notion of an inner life and to provide a bridge to our time where we thrive on layered meanings. All that latency waiting to be exploited! Once you drape an alligator shawl around a lady’s shoulders or build some serious plumbing into an evening dress, the game is on. Any and all interpretations are welcome.<

I realize upon reflection that mine is a provincial world circumscribed by the streets and history of New York City. I love this town and decry its dissolution into anonymous and soulless architecture. One place that has stubbornly ignored this trend for its entire 90 year history is Argosy Books & Prints on 59th Street. Upon entering, one is overwhelmed by the smell of old paper, rabbit skin glue and time. That was how it was when, as a 17-year-old working after school, I handled the old prints and delivered the framed ones all over the City. I can’t recall if I was fired or if I quit, though the latter seems likely as the year was 1966 and I wanted to make history, not file it. Remarkably I’ve returned to this place, the last of its kind, to hunt the stacks for the bizarre and for the lost.

There seems little doubt that the known past feels safer than the unknowable future. Maybe the armies of artists, illustrators, map makers and social satirists whose vivid renderings illuminate these old pages offer me a comradeship I desire. I also admit to a serious case of Ernst envy (who doesn’t?), though I’ve chosen the 18th century for my material, I’m pressed by their industry and desire to define their known world. These copper plate engravings are beautifully wrought on handmade laid paper and were originally intended as book illustrations. They survived fires, floods, wars and disinterest until 20th century print dealers cut them out and put them into frames for the designer trade or laid them out on tables at flea markets. There they awaited their second or third acts, their content long replaced or refuted by scholarship and technology. That’s where I first encountered them and imagined a collaboration.

Nobody really wants these old pictures and I feel no guilt for my alterations. I do see it as a collaboration with artists from the past who strived to illustrate the discoveries and attitudes of their time, an often Herculean task. Sometimes they had to cobble, from hearsay, a furry mammal or translate a ship’s artist’s sketchbook into sensational first reports of an expedition’s discovery of cannibalism! Human sacrifice! Nudity! The engravers met the ship at the dock and like all good reporters, raced to produce images for public delectation. Human curiosity fires the exact same results today.

FOUNTAINS & ALLIGATORS is a bit of a departure from the collage work I’ve created in that the theme is extended over several dozen plates. Usually I work only on individual themes. Before these collages, I worked 17 years depicting hair from every possible perspective. The work may change but the rigor/obsessiveness does not. Drawing is the passion behind it all. I am most interested in “what” and “how” .

Ruth Marten, NYC, February 22, 2016

»The Unvarnished Truth« is the first large solo exhibition of the New York artist Ruth Marten (*1949, NY) in Germany.

Following her art studies at the High School of Art & Design in New York and at Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Marten was active in the underground scene as a tattoo artist from 1973 to 1980, at a time when this form of expression was not yet legal in the U.S.  In 1977 she did tattooing at the Musée National d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris during the 10^th Biennale de Paris. Since the 1980s Marten, with her outstanding drawing talent, was hired as an illustrator by well-known publishers and music labels, fashion companies and major American newspapers and, for 30 years, collaborated with Jean Paul Goude. Her ability from the start to master all possible means of illustration has included the skillful use of overpainting and collage, techniques that have decisively shaped her current freehand work. For some years now, Ruth Marten has devoted herself fully to the fine arts, work that has since been shown in institutes and museums as well as private galleries in the U.S. and England, among others: Halsey Institute, Charleston; Skidmore College, Saratoga, NY; Palo Alto Art Center, CA; Museum for Natural History, NYC; Adam Baumgold Gallery, NYC and Hosfelt Gallery, CA & NYC.

Ruth Marten’s cosmos of pictorial inventions is absolutely endless, for she helps herself to the rich treasury of western cultural history in the form of prints from the 18^th and 19^th century. These original graphics she mostly culls from encyclopedias in which the knowledge of the world is depicted, from zoological atlases or catalogues of furniture or home décor, where they populate the flea markets and antiquarian bookshops and where Ruth Marten forages them out. She takes them home to her studio and breathes new life into them. With the same meticulous strokes, she adds elements, collages and coloring, infusing them with a visible subconsciousness, one that is subversive, poetic, sexually charged, playful and/or pernicious. Ruth Marten’s works on paper are unique in their dexterity and hold their own in the same tradition with Max Ernst and Jan Svankmajer.

In line with the exhibition, Van der Grinten Galerie, together with the Halsey Institute for Art Charleston in Charleston, is issuing in the Cologne publishing firm, Stefan Schuelke Fine Books, the publication Ruth Marten, The Unvarnished Truth with articles written by Jean-Christophe Ammann, Mark Sloan, Rachel Guthrie and John Marchant in German and English.

Furthermore, a Collector’s Edition of 35 copies will be published (book + collage, at a price of €385.00 incl. VAT)