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Blumenstück (signed)

by Irina Ruppert

Photographs: Irina Ruppert

Text: Martin Roman Deppner

Publisher: hyperzine

24 pages

Pictures: 11

Year: 2012

ISBN: 978-3-938218-43-3

Price: 19.80 €

Comments: with a real pressed flower on the last page along with the signing

With *Blumenstück* I started when I was grieving for my father.

Flowers and plants, growing and blooming, withering and fading, are shining in rays of sunlight against a pitch-black background. They seem to be floating and are entirely raised out their surroundings, drawing the viewer’s gaze to their shapes and colours, onto their leaves and blossoms. Irina Ruppert’s “flower portraits” recall the lush arrangements of Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch during the baroque era, or Yoshihiko Ueda’s minimalistic flower photographs. What differentiates Irina Ruppert’s work from classical flower still lifes is her focus on the potted plant and its particular visual relation to its respective container. These improvised, typically Balkan, flower pots, the planting and re-potting, the arranging and photographing – all this reflects the Kazakh origin of the photographer and her bonds to Eastern Europe. The revival of this tradition becomes a sensual and symbolic debate on her own uprooting. A breath of melancholy, a tender hint of transience and loss, of vanitas and vulnerability, is expressed in the fading leaves and rusty tins. Irina Ruppert’s flower still lifes depict not only the beauty of the plants and pots but also her personal memories; they provide continuance and seem to call after the viewer in the manner of Goethe: “Ah, linger on, though art so fair!” Sophia Greiff 10/2010

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