Richard Rutner. Gallery Weekend Berlin. Recent Work

Richard Rutner. Recent Work.

Text. Dr. phil. Lily Fürstenow

In this window installation, on the occasion of the Berlin Gallery Weekend 2025 that celebrates this year its 21st anniversary the works by US American artist Richard Rutner selected by us for a solo show build an exceptional dialogue with the surrounding urban contexts. Window Project is a cycle of exhibitions Art in Public Spaces initiated by curator Lily Fürstenow with a special emphasis in the heart of Berlin city-center Mitte district on the local neighbourhood surroundings and communities. Richard Rutner’s artistic project  installed in the windows of a monument protected former GDR housing blocks from the late 1980ies brings various layers and topographies together – serene dwellings from the Greek island of Milos, US American longing for travel in search of the lost paradises in Europe and the notorious Torstrasse flair in Berlin city center famous for its high end restaurants, party locations, nightlife non-stop and gentrification. 

The prints are mounted directly onto large panes of glass, engaging in a quiet but powerful dialogue with their urban surroundings. The first series of works, a cycle of watercolours depicting holidays on the Greek island of Milos, radiates with Mediterranean clarity. White rectangles of houses, flat-roofed and sun-drenched, are rendered in luminous washes of white, edged against an impossibly blue sky. These iconic forms—houses, walls, windmills, streets and sand beeches—appear dreamlike in their simplicity.

What makes the installation particularly striking is the way these prints interact with the reflections of the real-world Berlin cityscape in the glasspanes. Seen from the street, it’s often impossible to tell where the watercolours end and the reflections begin. The white geometric volumes of Berlin’s inner-city apartment blocks, also glowing in spring sunlight, merge with the painted dwellings of Milos. Two distinct geographies—urban Berlin and idyllic Greek island—dissolve into one fluid visual plane. The result is a surreal fusion of real and imagined spaces, collapsing not just spatial but also perceptual borders. One stands before the window, unsure whether they are gazing outward or inward. The white windmill, spinning gently in the painted breeze, becomes almost hyper-real—its glowing silhouette mirrored in the glass, echoing the passing light.

The work series entitled Gizmo Convention shifts both tone and palette. Here, the artist embraces delicate pastel tones— pinks, mint greens, pale yellows and sky blues—to create floating worlds of enigmatic forms. These “gizmos,” rendered with both curiosity and irony, seem like hybrids of domestic appliances and organic specimens. Mysterious yet familiar, their outlines suggest devices we might rely on daily—tools of invisible labour—yet whose inner workings remain opaque. They hover in softly modulated, ambiguous backgrounds, like diagrammatic dreams. In some works, fragile structures reminiscent of electrical pylons emerge from the pastel haze, suggesting the infrastructure of modern life as both vital and alien.

This tension—between presence and absence, between function and aesthetic mystery—recalls the metaphysical stillness of Giorgio de Chirico or Juan Miro, while the sunlit white architecture evokes the structural lyricism of Raoul Dufy. The delicate techno-organic forms of Gizmo Convention bring to mind the ambiguous appliances of Paul Klee—though rendered here with almost feminine softness. And the window-as-canvas itself echoes the spatial experiments of artists like James Turrell or Olafur Eliasson, transforming not only perception but the very act of seeing.

Together, these works offer a fluid meditation on space, light, and the blurred boundaries between what is seen, remembered, and imagined. In their reflective play, they invite us to reconsider the stability of our surroundings—and suggest that perhaps the most important windows are the ones between worlds. Richard Rutner exhibited his works at the Begegnungsstätte Mehr-Mitte earlier in 2021. His work is familiar and loved by Berlin art publics. He is not a complete stranger in this city either, his great grandfather used to live here and collect art before he emigrated due to the beginning of the World War II. Sometimes you never leave forever. And sometimes art dissolves geographical borders. This year for the 1st time in history Berlin as the only city across Germany has chosen to commemorate May the 8th as a public holiday to celebrate the liberation from the fascist regime and the end of the Second World War. For peace and love.