Ruth Vollmer

24 March to 5 May 2002

The late Ruth Vollmer was one of the most influential artists working in the post-war years in New York and yet very few people know her name or her work. Her influence is very apparent on the works of Richard Tuttle, Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson and Sol LeWitt. Ruth Vollmer (1903 -1982) was born and lived in Germany until emigrating to New York in the 1930s.

Ruth Vollmer - Drawings and Sculptures set out to tell the remarkable story of Ruth Vollmer's life. Vollmer and her husband were avid collectors of art and artefacts. Their collection was bequethed to The Museum of Modern Art in New York and included works by Giacometti, de Chirico, Miro, Klee and Picasso, in addition to Eva Hesse, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Mangold, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Richard Tuttle and Robert Smithson. The influence of Ruth Vollmer on the younger generation of artists emerging in the 1960s is one side of the story. She too was greatly influenced and affected by their input, advice and support on her art-making. Robert Smithson and Sol LeWitt did much to expose Ruth's work to the world in magazine articles.

‘Drawings and Sculptures' took place twenty years after her death and was exhibited at Inverleith House as Ruth Vollmer's work is linked closely to natural forms. The legendary New York gallerist Betty Parsons wrote about Ruth Vollmer ‘the geometry of space, in an immortal pace, like the power in a flower.' Sol LeWitt wrote about Ruth Vollmer in 1970 stating that ‘Geometry is used as a beginning just as a nineteenth-century artist might have used the landscape.' Ruth was deeply interested in the natural sciences and mathematics and in their application to the arts, her mind was open to new ideas, and she encouraged a number of artists whose formative efforts have since born fruit, among them are Eva Hesse, the late Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Tuttle.

Exhibition supported by the Scottish Arts Council International Projects and The Peter Barker-Mill Charitable Trust. The Estate of Ruth Vollmer is represented by The Jack Tilton Gallery New York.

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