User:KreatorofArt

Ralf Ziervogel (* February 11, 1975 in Clausthal-Zellerfeld) is a German artist. His works include drawings, installations and texts. Ralf Ziervogel lives and works in Berlin and New York City.

Ralf Ziervogel, 2019

Life

Ralf Ziervogel graduated in 2005 as a master student in the visual arts program at Berlin University of the Arts in the class of Lothar Baumgarten. Ziervogel was a scholarship recipient of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and received the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff scholarship in 2006. He already had his first US gallery appearance in 2004 at David Zwirner Gallery in New York City and his first solo museum exhibition in 2007 at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Ziervogel lived in New York City from 2007 to 2011, supported in part by the one-year New York Fellowship of the Berlin Senate Cultural Administration in cooperation with Triangle Art Association in New York City and later by Robert Wilson's Watermill Center in Upstate New York. In 2014, he received a fellowship at the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo / Casa Baldi. In the same year, he was awarded the Graphic Prize of the Claus Hüppe Foundation in Oldenburg, Germany. This was followed in 2016 by a residency fellowship at the Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany. Between 2013 and 2016, Ziervogel taught sculpture at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee. In 2023, he moved to New York City with the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

Work

Ralf Ziervogel is known for detailed, absurdly apocalyptic drawings. Without preliminary drawings, he creates contour-drawn figures on paper sheets measuring up to 10 x 30 ft, which run through meandering excesses of violence in black and white. Viewed from afar, they form an ornamental mesh. In addition to graphic works, Ziervogel devotes himself to installations and interventions. Reflections determine the form of his works, endlessly declined clichés are connected in opposite ways. In 2008 Ziervogel works together with the structural engineers Schlaich Bergermann Partner and David Chipperfield Architects on the realization of the building project ECCE on the Tempelhof airfield in Berlin. A white, walkable cube with an edge length of 400 ft and the largest cantilevered roof in the world. In 2013, a second large work section of drawings is created: with black gouache on his fingertips, Ziervogel repeats on paper the movements they would make when operating tablets or smartphones. The words and sentences written afterwards in capital letters, but miniscule, barely legible script, which accompany the black fingerprints, are a kind of protocol and form a second level in the drawing. Large formats follow, with the use of all body parts, head, arms and legs. The compositions of individual black parts become dynamic constellations and off-kilter creatures: "Amorphous entities in epileptic stasis: blueprints of digitally tortured bodies. Ziervogel strives for total zero, a wormhole, an implosion." (Quote: Jutta Schütt, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 2015) Since 2019, the visual artist has increasingly devoted himself to actionist works and installations.

Publications

• Ken Johnson (Print, July 23, 2004). Art in Review, Happy Days Are Here Again, The New York Times.
• Noemi Smolik (Print, February 2007). Reviews, Artforum.
• Dominikus Müller (solo catalog, 462 pages, ISBN 978-3-86560-499-6) Every Adidas Got Its Story, Koenig Books London, 2008
• Dirk Luckow, René Dorn, Harald Falckenberg, Ralf Ziervogel (solo catalog, 184 pages, ISBN 978-3-86442-254-6) As If, Deichtorhallen Sammlung Falckenberg Hamburg, Snoeck Cologne, 2019

Public collections (selection)

• Museum of Modern Art, New York City
• Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
• Kunstmuseum Bonn
• Sprengel Museum, Hanover
• Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Graphische Sammlung im Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
• Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, Sammlung Schering Stiftung im Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin