There’s a warning in Sibylle Ruppert’s art: if the devil doesn't get you, technology will. And if they both miss, it’s your own perverse instincts and desires that’ll consume you.
The German artist (1942-2011) filled her drawings, paintings and collages with writhing bodies and gnashing teeth, evil spirits and throbbing phalluses, glistening leather and technological freaks. The implication is that all of this chaotic sci fi horror porn was a way for Ruppert to deal with the legacy of the war and a litany of personal traumas.
In the first work here, a tiny etching, a cock emerges from some dripping abstract blob-form, only to be licked by a faceless flesh ball. A little drawing nearby shows a body with far too many buttocks, too many vulvas. In a huge charcoal, a bird-beaked demon pinches the penis of a supine hermaphrodite while skulls scream in the background. Pretty standard Saturday night, am I right.
All this demonic torture climaxes in a four- panel painting where man is desperately battling beast. Forms writhe, penises mutate into pincers, genitals metamorphose into bug-eyed mecha-gods. The work’s classic renaissance themes are shot through with erotic terror and sci fic techno-dystopianism. All are jaw-droppingly painted.
Leather appears in other works, framing bare boobs and bums as creatures are crushed in vices and workers file past post-human cyborg spectres. All this erotic, traumatic horror is way too over the top, absolutely obscene, disconcertingly vile and genuinely amazing. Is it a warning about the dangers of transhumanism, of the devastating power of technology, of the endless shadows cast by trauma? Maybe, but it sure makes all of that look like a lot of fun.
