Tanja Ritterbex (1985, Heerlen) has already seen a great deal of the world. In 2006, she graduated from the Maastricht Academy of Fine Art, where she studied the visual arts. She then studied in Salamanca and Düsseldorf and completed a residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam from 2014 to 2016. She knew that she wanted to be an artist since primary school. Now she lives and works in Berlin: a city she says is never boring, where she meets artists from all over the world and where she can expand her network of artists. 

Mama Steht Kopf

Freely translated, the title of Ritterbex’s solo exhibition is ‘Mum is upside down’. Tanja Ritterbex’s works show different phases of her life: from the period before she became a mother to the time afterwards. She also engages with themes such as social media’s like culture and the beauty industry. Ritterbex shows ‘real life’ and plays with old rules and ideas in her work. The result is humour and self-reflection.

Cheerful, exuberant and moving

Ritterbex brings her ideas to life through the use of wild brushstrokes and colourful scenes. Her work is joyful and exuberant but also moving. In her work, Ritterbex often portrays herself as a self-confident woman. Anyone taking a longer, closer look will however discover a deeper layer full of vulnerability. Her Selfie Series is one example, a project in which she took a selfie every day for a year. She used these as inspiration for 365 painted portraits showing her in all her feelings, sleepy-eyed, without make-up.

Pushing back frontiers of figurative painting

Ritterbex pushes the limits of what painting is. She combines paintings with ceramic figurines, drapes canvas instead of stretching it and created a 12-metre-long painting just for this exhibition: The Three Graces: three artists, three mothers, three sisters, three friends, three generations. In creating the work, she drew inspiration from her conversations and collaboration with the other two artists.