Ruti De Vries’ practice is like an ever-expanding spiral, incessantly gathering new motives and materials to form an enigmatic mythology that keeps haunting her works, drawing equally from ancient, indigenous, and outsider art, as from the worlds of fashion and theater. Ruti De Vries works quickly and intuitively, letting her hands lead the way, oscillating between obsessive laboring and immediate expressiveness. De Vries’ sculptures are made from various materials. They usually offer only a shell of a structure, an eviscerated presence. These bric-à-brac taxidermies populate stage-like environments, where time seems to have frozen in the midst of things, leaving us with a silent choreography of suspended gestures and charged feelings. In these fragmented yet meticulously constructed limbos, distinctions between human and animal, masculine and feminine, organic and artificial, dissolve. Through her use of different crafts, Ruti de Vries explore issues of gender, labor, and creative hierarchies, as well as the cultural structures of kitsch and melodrama. Ornamentation, patterns and symmetry, all highly characteristic of craft, take center stage, and contribute to a constant tension between two-dimensionality and volume, the graphic and the sculptural, sign and presence.

 Ruti De Vries (b. 1989, Tel Aviv) lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel. She holds an MFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Tel Aviv (2015); Exchange Program at Beaux-Art Paris (2014); B.ED in Education and Fine Arts from Hamidrasha, Beit Berl College (2012).Solo shows include Nahum Gumtan Museum, the Artists Residence, Herzliya and Ha’Kibbutz gallery, Tel Aviv; Schimmel Projects, Art Centre Dresden, and. Group shows include Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Herzliya; MoBY: Museums of Bat Yam, Bat Yam; Petach Tikva Museum of Art, and The 6th and 8th National Drawing Biennale, Jerusalem, among others. She is a 2016 recipient of the Israeli Ministry of Culture Young Artist Prize; Rappaport Prize (2020); The Yehoshua Rabinovitz Foundation Grant (2015); Asylum Art Grant (2022); Navon Prize (2024) ; and participated in the Cite Internationale residency in Paris, recently she has finished Artport residency 2024. Her work is included in the Israel Museum collection, Haaretz art collection, Tel Aviv Museum collection, Atlas Hotels, and many private collections. Currently she is in a residency at the Kunsthalle Bethanien supported by Artis, and will participate in the Villa Empain residency in the upcoming year. In November 2026 she will have a solo project at The Israel Museum.