Ralph Fleck

Straddling realism and abstraction, German artist Ralph Fleck investigates order and human construction in sculpturally painted landscapes featuring palette-created mountain peaks, aerial city views, book stacks, flowers, and crashing waves. The process is a reflection on how order is formed through nature and humans and their convergence with art. Heavily textured with large brushstrokes and fields of color, works such as Genova 11 IV (2019) highlight the link between paint’s formlessness and reality’s defined expanses. Focused on the science of seeing, his paintings capture the essence of his subjects and challenge art created as automated reproduction. Central to his process, Fleck paints with immediacy to depict the core nature of his subjects; the result are luminous works with rich tones that do not lose sight of their pictorial origins. Fleck studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. His work is in the collections of the El Segundo Museum of Art, the Augustiner Museum, and the Kunstmuseum Celle.