Sembrar Futuro | Robert Ritter

In this new series of artworks made with mixed media on skateboard, the artist Robert Ritter presents us with a strong content on a tattooed surface. He fuses the artistic scene of skateboard culture with the reference to his own works, especially the inked arms.

The price is per skateboard, two skateboards are shown in the photo.

"Skateboard culture has always had a great attraction for me. As a teenager, I skateboarded a lot and was fascinated by the iconography of the boards. Now, with the help of cultural funding, being able to design my own boards is great. I approached it like arm pieces and collected motifs and painted them on paper. Like a tattoo, a sleeve. I had these tattoos printed on 50 boards. Digital printing on heat sheets, 7 layers of maple, as befits a board.

The question of what a picture support is or can be has always been part of my work. Why is it rectangular and rigid on the wall? Does a work of art transform into something else when it has a different shape or rushes across the asphalt under the feet of a skater? I like that the boards still look like arm pieces. But there are also slogans. Rustic lettering is added to the carefully drawn motifs. Destruction or addition? The delicate images are completely or partially covered up. Sometimes quite unpleasant. And again the question of painting. Is painting when a motif is carefully worked out or when you blast lettering over it? When the skateboard is used, scratches appear. Is that painting too?

By the way, the slogans fit the skateboards just as well as the posters. Skateboards are almost always a means of expression with which the rider can identify himself." - Robert Ritter, 2024

Robert Ritter can be described as a master of materiality, who knows how to use color in the form of high reliefs: countless layers of color are laid thickly on top of each other, thus achieving haptic moments of real objectivity, while the last of these layers of color serves as a canvas for the final motif. In this way, Robert Ritter draws a line from purely representational art, which seems figurative in the style of the tattoo cult, to traditional maritime portraits, to the pure texture and material properties of the color. The canvas as the carrier of the respective motif sometimes becomes the base of the work itself, or is destroyed or reduced to such an extent that it is only recognizable as a net-like weave structure.

Other works by Robert Ritter