Ruth Loibl was born in Nuernberg / Germany in 1959 and grew up in Bamberg. She studied fiber art and textile design at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuernberg and sculpture at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin. In 1989 she finished her studies as topgraduate and moved to Rheinfelden, a small industrial town just at the border to Switzerland. There she lives together with her husband and three children.
In her works the artist refers to the structures and stories of every-day-life and she explores the spaces where daily life and art meet each other. For example there are plait patterns in craft and art works since hundreds of years and in many different cultures. Beyond this treasure of beautiful artificial plaits there is a plait pattern gained as hand-on experience during childhood, when the artist learned to plait her hair in long braids. So for a couple of months it could be a challenge for Ruth Loibl how to bridge the gap of worldwide ornamental tradition and her private expert knowledge.
Her artistic practice of sculpture and drawing always went along with the passion for literature, theatre and even verbal expression in daily life. So in 1993 Ruth Loibl started to publish her own row of books, called “Spielen und Aufräumen gleichzeitig” (to play and to tidy up at the same time). This title is fruit of listening to the chat of children, but also it may tell something about the strict and accurate craftsmanship working together with artistic airiness. Since 1996 the studio of the artist contains several cabinets for types of lead and a manual proofing press. Manual typesetting gives opportunity to arrange and combine words and texts in a process that is dominated by handgrips more than by aesthetic or even intellectual decisions. The act of printing transforms these compact arrangements of types into a bare and blank black and white pattern. Sometimes the result of careful typesetting yet is disturbed by special effects realized during the print process: For example two layers of printed text are overlapping in calculated areas. Thus the readability in these areas may be reduced, the file of the narration may even be disrupted. But the unforeseeable aesthetic events produced by the clash of two words are pretty to look at and they are telling a story as well. You can read the patterns like a text and you can contemplate the text like an image.