Friederike Ruff

Is All that we See or Seem but a Dream within a Dream (The body as an archive)

2017

Friederike Ruff is a collector. She casts about unusual items such as toys, religious fetishes, boxes of torn magazines, stuffed animals, dolls and other ephemera that gain an afterlife in collages and installations.She is a collector of ideas. She engages in research, read and reflect and seek information about topics spanning from psychology, philosophy, poetry, alchemy, history and politics (just to mention a few).The impressions she brings home from her numerous journeys, can be called the third collectors’ items she is interested in.Friederike Ruff is a collector of memories. Travelling is an essential constituent of her artwork. The impressions and experiences gathered throughout her journeys become the starting point of stories that develop on the canvas in oftentimes miraculous ways.Friederike Ruff regards the process of image creation as an elevator to the underworld where she encounters her personal inner world, archived impressions and underground channels to the ancient mythical cosmos of archetypes. She uses techniques such as painting, collage, embroidery and installation.In her work she engages with manifestations of the paradox and the linkage of micro and macro cosmos.Friederike Ruff is interested in the interconnection and kinship of the individual and the quintessential, the body in a physical and a metaphorical sense.Comings and goings, mortality, eternity and constant change are my main topics. Friederike Ruff was born in Weingarten (Germany) in 1980, studied visual art at Münster, Fachhochschule für Design (2000-2001), Stuttgart, Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart (2001-2006) and Madrid, Universidad de Complutense(2004) . Since 2007 she lives and works in Berlin/ Germany.