“Lisa Ruyter: One Million Postcards,” edited by Agnes Husslein und Martin Prinzhorn. Skarabaeus Press. Visit Ruyter’s website.
On artnet, Charlie Finch examines One Million Postcards, which surveys 14 years of the artist’s work: “Lisa had quit painting at age 28 and was enjoying her work as a publicist (!) when Marilyn Minter forcibly sent her to Peter Halley�s studio to work there. Holding these images in your hand, One Million Postcards becomes a startling flipbook of the postmodern holocaust, a conviction that the interface between referential high culture and the world out there will end in nothing but searing tragedy. Ruyter�s repeated method of overlaying dark, light-absorbing primary colors over fields of lyrical brightness drugs you as you turn the pages. Distinctions of various subject streams, so apparent in her different and successful solo shows over the years, turn into a steady whipping in the pages of a book, a kind of anti-pleasure. Only when she pictures herself in a stream of muted grays does one get a sense of relief. The yield of distinctions that one sees in Warhol�s ‘Shadows’ and ‘Skulls’ series, where light offers a respite, are absent in Ruyter�s reproduction. The effect is similar to Glenn Branca�s orchestra of guitars or the omnivorous overlay and sucking in of Godard�s Masculin F�minin: no rest for the weary granted here.” Read more.
