Deborah Kass: Back to Broadway

Andy Warhol never painted the great female Broadway belters Ethel Merman, Sophie Tucker or Barbra Streisand. While making paintings of almost every female superstar of his era, Warhol curiously avoided making any work based on la Streisand or Merman. The New York painter Deborah Kass became well known in the 1990s for a series called the "Warhol Project" where she expertly reproduced paintings of Barbra in a style very reminiscent of Warhol's mid-1960s screen-prints and in a manner that seemed to correct the omission

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Not in Exile: Lisa Ruyter

Lisa Ruyter's paintings are based on individual photographs that she takes, document parties, fashion events and street scenes. She transcribes certain areas of these images on canvas using a muted color palette evoking Pop. What at first appear like simple but giant-size paint-by-number works slowly reveal themselves to be complex arrangements of flat color. Her style freezes the image's narrative and pushes it towards abstraction.

Ruyter was born in 1968 in Washington D.C., studied at MCPS Art Center in Maryland, as well as at the School of Visual Arts and Hunter College, New York. She has had more than 25 solo shows. She lived and worked in New York for several years, when she became well-known in the art scene as an artist-practitioner - someone who makes art, blogs about it, and has also run several gallery spaces, including co-directing Team Gallery. When many artists would have rested on their laurels in New York, in 2003 Ruyter moved her studio to Vienna and also opened a gallery there.


RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY: Lisa, What prompted your move to Vienna in 2003?

LISA RUYTER: I went to Vienna at the beginning of the year to look at Georg Kargl's space in preparation for my second exhibition there. I was also visiting Thaddaeus Ropac's gallery in Salzburg because I had just started to work with them. On this trip I got to know a bit about the scene. I decided to open a little gallery space, Galerie Lisa Ruyter, and this went so well that after a few restless years, I ended up moving my studio to Vienna as well. At the beginning I knew about three people and did not speak the language.

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