Los Angeles was the city of Allen Ruppersberg’s beginnings in the late 1960’s. He graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute (later Cal Arts) in 1967 and had his first solo exhibition at the legendary Eugenia Butler gallery in 1969. This same year he attracted wide critical attention when he opened Al’s Café. When Harald Szeemann invited him to participate in Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, and then included him in Documenta 5 three years later, Ruppersberg’s stature as a young conceptual artist was established. All along five decades, Ruppersberg has developed his unique voice in conceptual art. He is an avid collector, a vernacular anthropologist that has spent years amassing an immense trove of postcards, educational films, magazines, posters, comic books, obituaries, newspaper clippings, records, objects and ephemera of all sorts. This archive serves as a regular resource for the artist, who tirelessly draws, copies, classifies, rearranges and recycles elements in the making of his works. As he himself has stated: “The idea of rearranging my life and the work is an ongoing subject.” Language is a key element in Ruppersberg work.
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