Threewalls is pleased to present two conjoined shows by Stephen Reber and Anders Ruhwald. Reber is a Chicago-based artist who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Ruhwald is the ceramics artist-in-residence at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan). The exhibition was curated by Shannon Stratton, Executive and Creative Director of Threewalls.

Reber and Ruhwald are both sculptors whose work locates and amplifies the materiality, elegant geometry, and subtle detail of the contemporary built environment. Where Reber’s work draws on the exterior, Ruhwald’s turns to interior architectures; both artists extract and reinterpret the poetry of design in their respective practices. Displayed together, their pieces shift from outside to inside and back, constructing minimal tableaux that retrain the viewer’s attention on the often-muted details that surround us everyday.

Reber’s work is an ongoing inquiry into the sculptural elements of architecture. He creates much of his work using familiar building materials such as plywood, plastic laminate, and decorative paneling. Through geometric reduction and repetition, Reber constructs elements that offer a bridge between an object and architectural space. These objects and their support structures present a tangible, oddly familiar experience rooted in remembered history.

Anders Ruhwald’s ceramic sculptures toy with the association of material with function. His playful, somewhat mischievous works interact with specific sites and bodies, questioning assumptions about objecthood. To wit, these objects take on a character that vacillates between personified things and thingified persons, inflecting ceramics with an affect that suggests that perhaps they have a life beyond human projections.

Stephen Reber is Adjunct Associate Professor of Sculpture at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He holds a BS from Nazareth College of Rochester and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work has been featured at the Evanston Art Center (Evanston IL), International Sculpture Conference (Philadelphia), C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore), Winston Gallery (Washington, DC). Reber’s Threewalls exhibition was curated as part of the SOLO program for local and regional artists; it will feature a new site-specific sculpture.

Anders Ruhwald lives and works at Cranbrook Academy of Art outside of Detroit, MI.
 He graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2005. His work has been exhibited at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (UK), The Museum of Art and Design (Denmark), the Cranbrook Art Museum (Michigan), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Pinakotek der Moderne (Munich), and Taipei Yingge Museum (Taiwan). In 2011, he received the Gold Prize at the Icheon International Ceramics Biennial in South Korea. He also received a major work stipend from the Danish Art Foundation in 2010.

The exhibition will be on view at Threewalls, 119 N Peoria #2C, Chicago, IL, through July 26. Normal gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11 AM to 5 PM.

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Tags: Anders Ruhwald, Stephen Reber, threewalls, West Loop