Kathy Ruttenberg

Kathy Ruttenberg is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, painting, and animation. Emerging from New York's early 1980s East Village art scene, her allegorical paintings contributed to the vitality of the new figurative expressionism of the era. Over the last four decades, her work has gradually shifted from painting towards an emphasis on sculpture. Oscillating between the intimate and the monumental, she uses ceramic, bronze, and light to explore themes of ecofeminism, animal liberation, and sexuality.


Artist Statement

In my pursuit of defining and refining my vision as an artist, I have had the opportunity to work in a variety of media and mediums. Each opportunity offers new knowledge that has helped me broaden my language. From working on small, intimate pieces to public work installations, I have found the importance of having built this foundation of my personal language, full of symbolic imagery, which is ever-growing, with my expanded horizons of influences and experience.

With this language, I portray inner landscapes that allow me to incorporate fantasy to tell stories of emotional vulnerability. The drama can be as subtle as the wind blowing or as extreme as a woman giving birth to a horse. I am deeply connected to the raw beauty of nature and man’s relationship to the emotions of animals, understanding instinct, all of which gives rise to the anthropomorphic characters that weave in and out of the narrative that is my expression.

How and where do man and beast connect? Intentionally, I create mysterious ambiguities, as this allows viewer participation to interpret the drama, reflecting their understanding of the visual language in my ceramic work.


https://kathyruttenberg.com/