Ulrich Rucktiem sculptuur/sculpture

In 1977 it was all about simplicity. Ulrich Rückriem was thirty-nine at the time, four years my senior. The thin concrete floors of the Van Abbe- museum in Eindhoven needed reinforcing in places; today, in the Stede- lijk, twenty years later, things aren't any different. Few museums were built to take sculpture. In the history of Renaissance art and thereafter, sculpture occupies a peculiar, somewhat marginal position. Painting, with its splendid colours and dashing compositions, was much more seductive. Painters transported their public into exciting, dramatic stories. In an attempt to vie with the fluid mobility of painting, sculptors made reliefs in marble or bronze (quite a lot of wood, too, in Germany), seeking a substitute for colour in the gleam of the gently curving surfaces. Statues were placed in niches or on plinths, in carefully chosen architectural locations. Heavy sculptures stood in city squares and parks, dignified and decorative, the figures often incorporated into large funerary monuments or graceful fountains. The complex attitudes and movements of statues had to do with their relation to painting. In 1977, in the catalogue of Rückriem's exhibition in Eindhoven, I wrote: Ulrich Rückriem firmly maintains that sculpture ought to be simple and intelligible. Materials should not be changed into something that is foreign to their character (a lace collar carved from marble, for example); whatever is done with the material should be recognisable. It should retain its distinctive character and not be stifled in the subsequent phase of the process.