RIBOT is pleased to present The Skin of Time, the third solo exhibition at the gallery by German artist Felix Schramm (Hamburg, 1970; lives and works in Düsseldorf).
The exhibition brings together a group of recent and previously unseen works that, through different artistic languages, offer a synthesis of the artist’s poetics while investigating the relationship between matter, space, and time. Deeply rooted in sculpture, Schramm’s practice conceives these elements as generative forces of form—active presences that weave different processes and temporalities into dialogue.
The gallery’s ground floor presents three large-scale works that further develop the research initiated with the Dark Site series through a new formal and material process. Created on plasterboard panels, onto which Schramm applies debris and remnants from his own working process before covering them with silver leaf, these works assign an active role to time itself. The oxidation of the surface, unfolding over the course of approximately ten years, generates images in constant transformation, where different temporalities coexist. Interrupting the continuity of the surface are mirrored elements, reflective on both sides, which incorporate the surrounding space and extend the boundaries of the work into a suspended dimension between physical presence and optical illusion.
In dialogue with these new works, Schramm presents a recent sculpture from the Accumulation series. A large crumpled sheet of copper descends into the space, suspended from the ceiling by a strap. Beneath this unexpected, almost celestial manifestation of form, without ever coming into contact with it, a plexiglas pedestal retains only the memory of its original function, transforming instead into a casket that preserves a fragment of matter resting on a mirror, visible through its transparent surfaces. Deprived of its traditional role, the pedestal thus acquires a conceptual significance, contributing to a broader reflection on the very nature of sculpture, reconstructed imaginatively through the balance of the composition and the system of spatial relationships.
The lower floor features a new series of Dark Site works produced in 2026. Here too, the layering of materials and temporalities forms the core of the investigation, yet the presence of an intense red, which characterises the plexiglas case, completes the works while introducing a further dimension. Like an enclosure that contains and protects what it holds, the colour evokes the body and its vulnerability without ever assuming an explicit form or meaning. Beneath it, debris and discarded materials are transfigured by silver leaf, in a continual shifting between value and lack of value.
Also on the lower floor is an installation from the Intersection series, one of the most representative bodies of work in Schramm’s practice and of his relationship with RIBOT. Through an apparently destructive gesture, the artist generates a new spatial configuration, calling into question architecture as a stable structure. Space thus reveals itself not only as a physical condition but also as a mental and perceptual experience.
On the occasion of the exhibition, the artist has also produced a special project comprising ten unique works: a series of small-scale Dark Site pieces, close to the dimensions of an A4 sheet of paper, in which Schramm’s practice is distilled into an intimate scale without losing the complexity of the processes that determine its very essence.