The Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich is presenting the painter Christoph Ruckhäberle (born 1972 in Pfaffenhofen, lives and works in Leipzig) in his first solo exhibition in Switzerland. The visual world of Ruckhäberle, who studied animated film at the California Institute of the Arts before his studies at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, is peopled by odd hard-edged figures, standing in front of coloured rhythmic backgrounds. Colourful drawings of faces recall carved masks, composed from a rich and playful vocabulary of forms. These forms, and the wealth of colours in Ruckhäberle’s works, are broken not only by skewed visual angles or perspectival inconsistencies, but also through the use of expressionist and surreal borrowings.
