The Mottos:

Paint faster then you think.

Work parallel to nature and the tradition of painting.

Andreas Rüthi was born 1956 in Zürich, Switzerland. After doing a Foundation Course in Watford, he studied from 1987 to 1990 at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.

His still life paintings where shown regularly from the mid nineties onwards in Europe, the USA and Australia.

Juxtaposing knick-knacks with art postcards, Rüthi has staged still-life paintings in a way where each carefully chosen item has a meaning and contributes to the overall resonance of the work, acknowledging the past-masters of the still-life painting.

From 2006 until 2018 Rüthi worked in Wales, where he had his first solo exhibitions in the following public spaces: Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown, Oriel Plas Glyn Y Weddw and Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea.

Since working in rural Burgundy and Collioure in the south of France, his subjects also include landscape paintings – made en plein air in his gardens.

Painting en plein air has become a performative action. Painting nature as en embodied experience is fundamental. This can be explained as two stages but in reality is more like a continuous cycle. The first is the mapping of the space of the garden through my engagement with planting, collecting, identifying, clearing etc. and the way that this activity becomes an internalised vision. The second is the coalescence of the this internal vision with the act of painting in the present moment and its concurrent engagement with the light, weather conditions and changing growth throughout the duration of the paintings. Through this way of painting, sometimes taking several weeks, I have evolved a new perspective, that rejects the fixed interpretations and applications of single lens technology and ideology.

These hybrid landscapes play with spatial and temporal simultaneity, where the light and colours from different times of the day co-exist in a single painting, connecting with painters across history. A selection of the Collioure paintings has been shown 2024 in the Musée d’Art Moderne, Collioure.