Galería Casado Santapau presents a new exhibition by the German artist Bernd Ribbeck, showcasing a series of small paintings and two site-specific murals.

Ribbeck’s work is directly inspired by a Brutalist landmark: the French architectural project Les Étoiles in Ivry-sur-Seine, designed by architects Renée Gailhoustet and Jean Renaudie in the 1970s. This complex of sharply angular, pointed structures captivated Ribbeck during a residency in Paris, where he first sketched his monumental lines on small sheets of paper—a key format in his creative process.

In his works, Ribbeck distills architectural elements into multicolored geometric motifs that resonate in each composition, blending structure and abstraction. His process involves applying layers of acrylic paint on MDF board, repeatedly drawing and reworking patterns with pens and markers to capture a depth reminiscent of the stepped structures and Brutalist surfaces of Les Étoiles.

By creating repetitive ornamental motifs based on images of late Brutalist architecture, Ribbeck introduces a paradoxical twist: he recovers something from modernism’s history by drawing on what it had negated. The duality as a conceptual and productive principle is characteristic of his work. Mathematics/spirituality, transcendence/opacity, space/surface, modernism/marginal art, rationality/intuition, drawing/painting—these are reference points Ribbeck condenses in his compositions, generating an illusion of seemingly infinite mental spaces. In the words of art critic Noemi Smolik, “the images unfold before the viewer’s eyes in a temporality that knows neither beginning nor end.”

Within the exhibition, Ribbeck’s murals amplify this duality. A paper cutout spanning two walls celebrates the ornamental scheme. Once again, the wall is covered with architecture, created in isometric perspective, highlighting the tridimensionality of the space. Echoing the geometric patterns of his paintings, the motif of the Renaissance arch is transformed into a recurring shape, combining spatial depth with a flat, decorative surface. Surrounding these murals, a series of paintings interact with each other, showcasing the balance between color, form, and space.

Ribbeck’s creative process is characterized by a meticulous, detail-oriented approach. His works, which evoke the geometric forms of mandalas, stained glass, and other architectural ornaments, are influenced by artists operating on the fringes of art history or whose works reflect spiritual ideas, such as Hilma af Klint or Emma Kunz. In his artistic practice, Ribbeck combines non-traditional materials like pens and markers with acrylic paint and varnish, layering color, scraping, and sanding to achieve a translucency that gives his pieces an almost three-dimensional depth. The paint is applied in several layers on partially polished MDF, then drawn upon with pen and pigmented markers, based on detailed preliminary sketches.

From the concrete geometry of Les Étoiles in Ivry-sur-Seine to the geometry in Fra Angelico’s paintings, visitors are invited to explore a visual narrative where architectures multiply and merge in a space that feels eternally expanded.