Annette Ruenzler

Born: 1968, Speyer

Based: Berlin

Ruenzler’s accomplished practice makes visible, with subtle power, the problematic presence of decorative in the modern, and the wild in the civilised. In her drawings, sculptures, silk-screen prints and installations, Adolph Loos’ functionalist assertion that “ornament is crime” appears subject to an insidious vandalism. But the droll products of Ruenzler’s fantasy world are carefully poised between the material rigours of Arte Povera and the fairytale excesses of Meret Oppenheim’s or Dorothea Tanning’s sexy surrealist objects. In her piece Liberation is Work (2008) the pollution of absolute Minimalist ideals appears as a mere shadowy stain from a distance, but on closer investigation emerges as a meticulous fine-line drawing of botanical forms on fleece wallpaper. The maimed chrome chair glistens with corporate chic in The Beauty of an Unacceptable Position (2008), but wears its dishevelled seat of human hair with morbid pride. Throughout Ruenzler’s practice, materials reminiscent of a bridal lexicon - glass, ceramics, satin, – gleaming in their celestial whiteness -are placed in anxious but convincing union with the austerity of office-world design and occasional traces of the human body, resulting in quietly troubling none-sequiturs of taste, gendered aesthetics, and style.

Laurence Figgis