ALEXANDER RUTHNER

Homeless Crackerjacks 22.05 – 21.06.2025

Alexander Ruthner’s work has long probed the uneasy border between beauty and disquiet. In hisnew exhibition Homeless Crackerjacks, he turns explicitly to the social and economic precarity humming beneath today’s networked world, explaining that he chose the title: Homeless Crackerjacks “as a nod to the general social and economic difficulties society faces. The globe is now densely knitted together—through the internet, personal connections, exhibitions, and, of course, the language of painting.”
Ruthner’s practice filters lived experience through mediated images—fashion spreads, art‐historical quotations, subcultural snapshots—but the final canvases vibrate with gestural
autonomy. “My energy‐laden, affect‐driven brushstrokes feel like ruthless hobos,” he says, “free of representation, beholden to no one. The works may start from web sources or art‐historical
themes, yet they live through their suggestive abstract gesture.” Earlier series of flower bouquets and hyper‐detailed grass fields exposed the fragile idyll of pastoral escape; trash and hooligans lurking in the greenery hinted at festival afterlives and ecological neglect. If the cornfields and night skies whisper of corrupted paradise, the newest paintings shout. The representational works contain slashing strokes that push figuration to the brink of dissolution; here colour fields collide, then collapse again, evoking a society whose connective tissue is fraying. Here, Ruthner anchors his abstractions to a deep pictorial lineage: muted grounds recall Dutch vanitas, while explosive highlights nod to post‐war action painting. The result is a canon‐conscious body of work that nonetheless drifts—hobo‐like—beyond obligation, staging the tension between the longing for pristine space and the rude irruptions of contemporary life.

Alexander Ruthner born *1982, currently lives and works in Vienna Ruthner has participated in a numerous group exhibitions, including at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), Museum 21er Haus and Kunsthalle Wien; Solo exhibitions include Galerie Senn (Vienna), Haverkamp Leistenschneider, (Berlin), Ibid Projects (Los Angeles), Dio Horia Gallery (Mykonos), Grieder Contemporary (Zurich) and others….