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July 7th, 2008
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A world gone mad

Michael Rittstein's work dips deep into depravity
Gallery Review | Search restaurants | Archives

By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
January 23rd, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Rittstein's paintings depict all manner of mayhem, often in futuristic sci-fi settings.
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Michael Rittstein: A Moist Trail, 1970–2007

at Veletržní palác Ends April 27. Dukelských hrdinů 47, Prague 7–Holešovice. Open Tues.–Sun. 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

Contemporary painting charged with an explosive sexual energy lives on in this impressive retrospective at Veletržní palác, the modern art venue of Prague’s National Gallery.
For the most part, Michael Rittstein (born in 1949) paints in an expressive-figurative style, but his work can also be described as a bunch of freaky scenes out of a sci-fi nightmare. The numerous works in the rooms leading to the official entrance of the exhibit set the stage. Sputnik (2001) includes space-age moms with their terrified babies in a moonscape; Soil Reapers (1988) shows monstrous men and women seemingly riding waves; and Forest (1988) is a devastated landscape in deep forest green, inhabited by nude figures, either copulating or sawing down trees.
Also before you enter the exhibition space proper is a standout from 2007: Deuced Mondrian, featuring a demon in thick blue slabs lurking behind a clean “Mondrian” canvas. The demon’s long tongue drops over and across the canvas in thick, light-blue paint, and his tail jets out from the bottom of the Mondrian-like section. This relatively simple painting (compared with the others) is exquisite, with its chunks of blue and white and Mondrian section at the center, all on a light beige background. One wonders if any of the work can be better than this.
Then the official part of the exhibit begins, with Rittstein’s earliest works from the 1970s, many of which look like scenes from low-budget horror films in muted colors. For example, Pool (1976) portrays humans who could also be zombies floating in a basin of fungus and assorted dentures. Mushroomers (1975) shows a group of adults imploding in a living room, with psychedelic mushrooms on the coffee table and one figure standing on his head for a simply bizarre effect.
The works follow in chronological order, with a series of car paintings from the late 1970s filled with either near-zombies or stretched-out freaks (families and fornicating couples). The cars are like automotive skeletons, with just a chassis, seats and motors — or even less than that — set in abstract, futuristic environs.
On the Pipes (1979) is the first of many grotesque sex parties in various settings. This one, set in a boiler room, has real tufts of dried weeds pasted onto a corner of the canvas, and aging blue socks hanging over the edge. Self-help (1979) and In and Out (1978) expose socialist-era tower-block apartments as wastelands before they were even built to completion. And, in Waiting Room (1980), meshes of nude gray flesh battle with each other in a green box or a typical waiting shelter for buses found in Czech villages.
Relationships are exposed in all facets, particularly in Local Story (1983), in which four panels show rough scenes of love (portrayed as hot sex or endless labor) and war (well-dressed couples seething with anger and battling with knives, axes and hot liquids).
At the far end of the gallery, there is a video from Czech TV featuring the artist, a separate room of drawings and watercolors from the mid-1970s to the 1990s, and three exceptionally large works, toned down in color, which resonate in the space.
While some of Rittstein’s later works are atypical in their lack of variety in color — yet still bright or deep in tone — they show the artist at his best, especially Japanese (2006). Done in two sections, one mostly black and one mostly dark blue, it is awash in sensuous figures and faces of Japanese women. The series “Office, Porno Publishers” (2002) offers three subtle variations in different, single-color versions. There are also a couple of noteworthy works painted on velvet.
One work titled for the appreciation of Czech viewers is The Brutus Band Playing at Hluboká lidí (2003–05), a keen view overlooking a mosh pit in the country, with all the dancing figures made from thick white dashes of paint, resembling little white birds or swans made of used bubble gum stuck onto the grayish-black canvas.
Overall, Rittstein paints a twisted world of creatures — humans, mutants and all sorts of animals or reptiles — in a whirlwind of bizarre scenarios, using either globs of color or two- or three-tone variations. His surrealistic, grotesque vision on oversize canvases is unrelenting, at times even overwhelming. It is both ridiculous and absurd, cruel and disturbing.
Throughout the show there are touches of ironic romanticism, particularly in the huge canvas centrally placed at the entrance (and exit) to the exhibition titled Invasion of Love (2007). This contains all the usual psycho-social commotion, though without the raw visions of sex and depravity. It covers four canvases and makes no sense at all, with its penguins (women?) riding on the backs of horses or crocodiles (men?).
Rittstein depicts a horrifically insane, mad and cruel world, in this painting and many others. Perhaps he is more of a realist than a fatalist after all.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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