Sibylle Ruppert: Dark Light on White Shadow

A retrospective of the largely unpublished oeuvre of Sibylle Ruppert, whose hyperrealistic works were inspired by Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille.  

Focusing on the largely unpublished and long-overlooked oeuvre of Sibylle Ruppert, offering the most substantial presentation of her work to date, this book documents the growing international attention to Ruppert’s work, positioning her oeuvre within a broader art-historical context.

Sibylle Ruppert turned childhood fears and wartime experiences into art. Born the night of the first massive bombing of Frankfurt, she spent her early years between nurseries and improvised air raid shelters. Ruppert’s richly detailed drawings, paintings, and collages investigate her traumas and the rifts within us they leave behind. Her works reveal a visual language in which bodies menace one another and fuse to produce grotesque creatures. Drawing inspiration from writers like Georges Bataille, Comte de Lautréamont, and Marquis de Sade, as well as the artists Francis Bacon and H.R. Giger, Ruppert created a prolific, surreal, erotic, and dystopian imagery―a singular oeuvre in hues of brown and gray. In 2010, a year before her death, the artist was the subject of a retrospective at the HR Giger Museum in Gruyères. Dark Light on White Shadow pays fresh homage to her oeuvre, which was displayed at Kunsthalle Giessen in 2023. With essays by the editors, among others.

Nadia Ismail is the director of the Kunsthalle Giessen.

 Paul Walter is the executor and holder of the estate of the artist Sibylle Ruppert.