Duality as a conceptual and productive principle is characteristic of Bernd Ribbeck’s work. Mathematics/ spirituality, transcendence/opacity, space/surface, modernism/outsider art, rationality/intuition, drawing/ painting are both reference points and the DNA of Bernd Ribbeck’s abstract compositions. In his small format paintings and drawings, the artist condenses them as geometrical and painterly elements to form an illusion of seemingly infinite mental spaces. At the same time, the paintings themselves are objects in space. Paint is applied in several layers on MDF, partially ground, and then drawn over with a pen and pigmented markers based on previous detailed sketches executed on squared drawing paper. “...the pictures unfold before the eyes of the viewer in a temporality that knows neither beginning nor end,” says the art critic Noemi Smolik. This “detemporalization” also applies to the selection of Bernd Ribbeck’s abstract shapes. A “wandering” always lies behind them. From the high culture of modernism to the codes of outsider art, medieval celestial charts, mathematical representations of the solar system, or mundane design elements such as roulettes or simply the original forms of circle, square and triangle. Bernd Ribbeck is not concerned with a “truth content,” but instead interested in the aesthetic structure of “visual thought”: “As a painter, I mainly believe what I see, and what I see shapes my imagination.”