Francis Ruyter born in 1968 in Washington DC, United States
Works and lives in Vienna, Austria Francis Ruyter is known for large scale, colorful and immediately recognizable treatment of a range of subject matters. These works have served as a personal index to the artist’s lived experience via self-­‐made photographic images. Ruyter began exhibiting in New York in 1993 and, like many artists of that moment, formed a special interest in navigating the glut of images, storytelling, invisible architectures, pathologic constructions, dissolving skins and representation, especially self-­representation. Ruyter’s early work is driven by drawings, comprised from an archive of found images forced into relationship via traced outlines, a web-­like structure that ultimately could be seen as representing an authorless and fugitive architectural form, such as that of the internet. In recent years, Ruyter has returned to the archive as subject matter, as a paradigmatic form of cultural artifact, but in a major conceptual shift. He has abandoned the use of self-­made photographic source material in favor of a self- indexed version of the FSA/OWI photo collection.