WANNA BE | Robert Ritter

In this new series of artworks made with a mixed media on paper, the artist Robert Ritter brings us an explosion of acid and bright colors and messages. Between psychedelic art, retro advertising and religious icons rising to the sky surrounded by a halo, the artist creates ultra-contemporary memento mori, taking references for his themes from pop culture and the past.
The work is sold framed.

WANNA BE is one of a series of “art posters” that Robert Ritter created during the second lockdown. They are an example of how the global pandemic, while locking down the whole world, also brought new forms of art and new artistic ideas to light. Robert Ritter decided to use public space as an exhibition space and began to produce a series of paste-ups using spray paint. These artworks were conceived in a series of 12, each individual sheet differs in color sometimes more, sometimes less, but although they are part of a group concept, they are all unique. Disco balls hanging in the sky like ominous stars, birds, skulls, portraits... pop cultural references and the artist's personal memories merge to create something new. Dr. Jürgen Graf: “Dark Pop: when mere kitsch meets something abysmal and takes on a depth that one would not have initially expected from either. The works on paper are overwritten with texts that are also a mixture of song quotes, Cuban propaganda slogans or personal mottos. At first glance, the posters are meant to radiate great clarity. As if you knew immediately what appeal was being sent out here. Concentric circles, somehow psychedelic, but also decorative, loud and gloomy at the same time. In front of them is a flock of ravens, threatening, but also poetic.

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