Biography of Allen Ruppersberg
Conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg radically changed the way we think about art by unearthing new and inventive medium combinations. Spearheading a range of new practices in art-making, Ruppersberg excelled in paintings, limited editions, multiples, photographs, sculptures, installations, and even books.
Born in 1944 and raised in suburban Cleveland, Ruppersberg became fascinated with animation and commercial art after visiting Disneyland as a young boy. Starting out as a painter, Allen Ruppersberg drew inspiration from everyday life, magazines, pulp fiction novels, and films, making them the subject of his work. He attended the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles where he struck up significant relationships with notable artists such as John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha.
Later Allen Ruppersberg began to incorporate crossovers in art, literature, and life and became an early advocator of audience participation. As he says himself, he is intrigued by the “relationship between high and low culture, the visual and the verbal, or reading and looking, and the need to examine the past.” His extraordinary work Al’s Café, 1969, an art piece masquerading as a restaurant, was ahead of its time, if not to say visionary, and was recognized as a seminal piece of installation art. Using language as an expression in its own right, Ruppersberg’s work lends itself perfectly to multiples with its fine interplay between media and consumer society from a simultaneously humorous and critical standpoint.
In 2011 Allen Ruppersberg’s astonishing work was honored with the prestigious United States Artists Award. Dividing his time between New York and Los Angeles, the artist has also been the subject of over 60 solo shows, most impressively in his 1985 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, that went on to travel to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Ruppersberg is featured in the permanent collections of MoMA the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The artist is also highly appreciated in Europe and his work can be found in the collections of Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt and the Foundation de Appel, Amsterdam.
