Lukáš Rittstein graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1997. While still a student, he showed that he was a sculptor of unmistakable qualities. Typical for his work is the use of a wide range of objects of everyday life or industrial materials that he sometimes combines with his own forms made from fibreglass.
He has created several dozens of sculptors over his short career. Each of them is connected with an aptly deep story related to the artist’s life, recollections and his rich imagination. Last but not least an interest in environmental and globally valid questions on the fate of our planet has contributed to his work. This is nourished above all by his interest in the fourth world, living in areas still uncontaminated by our civilisation. Of fundamental importance have been the trips he made with his girlfriend Barbora Šlapetová to Papua New Guinea where he met with the life of its inhabitants, still unchanged by the outside world.
The first series of Rittstein’s sculptures, some of which were created while he was still a student in 1994-1998, is entitled From Kitchen to Saturn. As the artist himself says, the internal and external universes are compared in this cycle. From Kitchen is a sculpture composed of several objects connected to the artist’s grandmother’s life. The sink, in which she scraped potatoes, the small tub that he bathed in when he was small and other objects are a reminder of moments of the artist’s childhood: “I symbolically experienced the internal universe and reconstructed the remembering of the remembrance of my grandmother’s things,” he said. The Saturn sculpture, made from industrial materials, is for the artist a symbol “of the merging of silhouettes of an industrial landscape with lights of the celestial bodies over it.” The rawness of the used materials uniquely resonate with the fragile feeling of the universe’s infinity.
This is followed by the Snapshots cycle from around and shortly after 2000. The artist speaks of these sculptures as of a landscape of volatile feelings. Transience, temporality, impermanence, elusiveness – such is the everyday situation; such is the existence of man. Some of the sculptures bear characteristic titles such as Elusive, in which Rittstein captured in an almost Baroque-allegorical way a feeling of an ever fleeting world, despite our attempt to hold or anchor the thing: “From one side the form flows away, from the other side it evaporates and the attempt to capture it is useless – a construction of clamps and spoons attempts to grasp it to no avail,” said the artist in describing this sculpture.
For the Dirty Sky series (made ca. 2000-2003) the common denominator for the sculptures is a laminated amorphous form that the artist casts from holes dug in the earth. This is combined with other objects of daily reality – such as dustbins and curtains, such as in the sculpture Dreaming One. Two beams of light stream from a Baroque-like floating cloud, protruding from dustbin tops: “It’s a cloud with Baroque-like light beams, but it’s also a dreaming face over a landscape or toxic smoke coming from dustbins,” said Rittstein. At the same time he started to create the Clean Sky series. A shared trait of these sculptures is the material used, also used to make the bodies of cars. It’s a kind of metallic skin stretched and polished to a perfect surface and painted celestial colours – colours of red twilight, azure or of the night sky. Thematically, this usually concerns the communication and relationship of two people. In the sculpture Together, Rittstein enlarged his grandmother’s and grandfather’s eye-glasses and forged them into a form that conceives them in a single space: “It’s the symbiosis of man and woman – a merging of “the thoroughly viewed” under a single skin. These two people will be in an eternal embrace. The sculpture is about their feelings and about what they saw, what is written in the stars,” said Rittstein.
The latest cycle is a series of sculptures called Forest. The work is inspired by the artist’s many years in the jungle in Papua New Guinea where he was intensely aware of the disappearance of the wilderness. These sculptures are loosely inspired by globalisation, environmental questions and civilisation problems. They are always made of a round, soft-like form that holds horizontal artificial timber as if the soul is attached to the axis of its existence” (Rittstein). Each of the sculptures has its own, specific story, whose meaning is, however, generally symbolic: It’s a search for a deeper anchoring of man in contemporary society. This experience formed with Rittstein when he lived among the indigenous tribes where he intensely experienced the staggering disappearance of man’s original connection with the world of nature. Rittstein’s work is voluminous and multivalent. The artist’s vast imagination and intensive experience of civilisation aspects of human existence in a universal context is omnipresent. All of Rittstein’s work is thus characterised by a confrontation of the internal and external universe.
