Kate Ruggeri
Thing Finder
Nov 15 - Jan 3

Freedom is not on the march. Against fascism, the artist’s embrace of a child’s consciousness has been a useful strategy before—a hundred years ago, this was one way to repel the legalized horror of the adult world and to carve out spaces of secret pleasure, imagination, and wildness. Fitting then, in this dangerous moment, that Kate Ruggeri takes as an avatar of the artist that “strange, maladjusted child” Pippi Longstocking, a Swedish invention two years after the end of World War II, and a long-popular figure iconic for her improbable strength, unruliness, and freedom. These paintings and works on paper reflect those qualities, both impudently immediate and slowly constructed, using collaged materials as diverse as Japanese paper and stationery, strands of grass, wood, wax crayons, and paint. They are works first and foremost of pleasure—the exuberance of color, the infinite mystery of organic form, the skilled playfulness of compositions that appear to morph in front of our very eyes. But they are not without conflict, either. Their woods are haunted, their houses are falling apart,  their order is always at risk. 

Ruggeri is a materially- and conceptually-heterogeneous artist, one who has worked in video, installation, performance, sculpture, and painting. This multivalent approach, not unusual among artists for whom freedom is an aspirational principle, is increasingly endangered by the internalized constraints of much contemporary art practice that seeks market differentiation by holding fast to a concrete stylistic brand. Endangered, too, by a resurgent fascism that will only thrive in the absence of that complex and uneasy culture real artists make. Ruggeri is one of those real artists; her art is one of daily looking and questioning, a matter of philosophy that seeks out meaning in surprise, a vision of life unconstrained by certitude. 

In Thing Finder, she stages a play between the wildness of organic form — both lush  and decaying — and the endeavor of building and cultivating, activities suggested by the circular cutouts in works on paper, Knobby and Apple Tree, and the doomed geometry in Villa Villekulla. Named after Pippi’s fictional home, this large painting is anchored by a sloping roof that recalls Picasso’s 1958 mural, The Fall of Icarus, which the historian TJ Clarke described as a “picture without perspective”—its dominant trapezoidal shape thwarting the mechanics of perspective and sending the eye back again and again to the surface. Like Icarus, Ruggeri’s painting seems to fan out rather than draw us inward, suspending us in the material exploration of the surface and creating spatial and conceptual equivalence between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ 

Ruggeri takes her show title from Pippi, who marveled:  

‘I’m a Thing Finder,’ said Pippi. ‘The whole world is full of things and somebody has to look for them. And that’s just what a Thing Finder does.’ 

‘What kind of things?’ asked Annika. 

‘Oh, all kinds,’ said Pippi. ‘Lumps of gold, ostrich feathers, candy snapcrackers, little tiny screws, and things like that.’

The experimental filmmaker and artist Agnès Varda once filmed herself unpacking a suitcase of souvenirs from a trip abroad with an earnest joy that one feels in front of Ruggeri’s paintings, too, embedded as they are with materials, patterns, and unexpected details. Varda’s film, The Gleaners and I, glimpsed a globalizing world and the ‘real Europe’ that Rachel Kushner describes as a borderless network of supply and transport, as well as the economically disenfranchised gleaners, scavengers, and collectors making a life in that system. Now we are being thrust back into a deglobalized world by a new era of fascists and isolationists armed with the old racist ideologies. How will we envision the role of the artist — the spirit as well as the task of the artist — now? In Ruggeri’s paintings, one answer is—with a child’s openness, keep looking, keep scavenging, keep gleaning.