PICTURES
VITA
Ralph Richter is a German contemporary mixed-media artist working between painting, relief and object. Born in Berlin-Kreuzberg in 1962, he trained as a carpenter and founded his own workshop in 1989. His long engagement with wood, construction and surface became the material foundation of his later artistic practice.
Since 2019, Richter has developed a distinctive process he calls Pressage, using printed newspaper, printing ink and solid wood to create relief-like pictorial objects. His work explores the relationship between transience and permanence, information and memory, material fragility and physical presence.
Richter lives and works in Lübeck, Germany.
Statement
Newspapers are made for the present. Their images and stories circulate briefly before becoming yesterday’s information. The paper itself is equally temporary: it ages, fades and disappears.
Ralph Richter uses this fragile material as the starting point for his work. Through his process of Pressage, fragments of printed newspaper are transferred onto solid wood. During this transformation, the original information gradually loses its legibility. Text becomes structure, images become colour, and news becomes material trace.
The resulting works exist between painting, relief and object. Wood gives physical presence and duration to what was originally ephemeral.
Richter’s work is therefore less concerned with preserving information than with transforming its residue. From news of yesterday, he creates images for tomorrow – pictorial bodies that seek to outlast time.