Born in 1948 and raised on an estate overlooking the Danube, with a gentleman blacksmith grandfather, Grosse-Ruyken studied philology and visual arts in Munich in the 1970s, where she became a pupil and friend of the Catholic philosopher Aloys Goergen. Her work is rooted in a conjoining of the metalworker’s craft and her mentor’s search for the unification of material and spiritual worlds.
Rita has been commended for her outstanding experience and dubbed a phenomenal and exceptional artist by the vice director and curator of the Frankfurt museum. To make her pieces, Grosse-Ruyken goes to extraordinary lengths of personal commitment and technological innovation. For her 1986 work, “The Silver Cord,” she cast, forged and hand-pulled refined silver into a diaphanous thread that she then wove into a quasi-transparent spatial structure, a 21-meter, or 69-foot cord that took eight months to complete. For “Rays of Light” — “Durchflutung,” in German — she developed a technique of embedding two wafer-thin concentric platinum rings invisibly into the initial gold disc, to provide a necessary reinforcement for the ever more fragile walls of the bowl.
The processes and results uncovered by Rita have no parallel or presence in history. Her technique is mainly defined by working with materials until they reach their physical limits. Her bowl installation has become recognized for the amazing sounds it resonates and has been displayed with speakers to transmit the sound of the bowl’s movements, captured and magnified by a system of sensors installed by musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra — a latter-day rediscovery of the music of the spheres. Like the Renaissance cosmologists and alchemists, Ms. Grosse-Ruyken is concerned with universality and transformation; the mathematics of the physical universe and the metaphysics of timeless space. In her hands the weight of pure gold becomes light, diaphanous, dissolving into an insubstantial eternity.
“The heaviness of the material is brought to the lightness of light,” Ms. Grosse-Ruyken said in an interview. “The heaviness is no longer felt. The light dissolves the material. I have inner imaginations and this is the concretization of the visions. It’s a long process — a strong dialogue between the material and me.”
RITA GROSSE-RUYKEN
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