The Surrealism Website
Sibylle Ruppert (1942-2011)
Sibylle Ruppert was born in Frankfurt in 1942. After the war her family was taken in by an aristocratic family who owned a castle and Sibylle spent her early childhood years as if in a dream world. Her father was a graphic designer and young Sibylle spent hours watching him draw. One day she seized his hand and promised him that she would paint nice colourful pictures just like him. Her first drawing surprised everyone, it was a brutal illustration of a fist striking the middle of a face – she was 6 years old.
She took the entrance examination of the Städel Akkademie and passed brilliantly and with the support of Prof. Battke she worked relentlessly and created up to 20 drawings a day.
As soon as she turned 18 she escaped to Paris, the city of her dreams, where she enrolled in a dance school in Clichy. She followed the strict regimen of dance classes and dancing in revues, and visited all the local museums and galleries and continued drawing her every free minute.
During a visit to New York, she decided to give up her dancing career, returned to her family in Frankfurt and started working as a drawing instructor at the art school founded by her father.
In 1976 she moved to Paris where she was able to exhibit her large format charcoal drawings, inspired by the morbid and the obscene writings of de Sade, Lautréamont and Georges Bataille.
Her work was much admired by HR Giger. In her large drawings, she depicted distorted insect and reptilian forms and sometimes explicit sexual imagery. They became friends and influenced each other's work. Examples of her work are to be seen amongst Giger's collection at the HR Giger museum.
See http://www.hrgiger.com/sibylle_ruppert
