Christoph Rihs

Christoph Rihs was born in Beirut in 1957 and lives and works in Weimar, Biel, and Bourguignon. He studied Fine Arts and Architecture at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. His artistic practice encompasses sculpture, object art, installation, and site-specific works. Central to his work is the exploration of form, structure, and perception. His works oscillate between precise construction and poetic openness. They emerge from reflections on space, time, and cultural reference systems, and respond sensitively to their specific location. Public projects and exhibition contexts are a recurring element of his work.

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Since the early 1980s, a central question in Christoph Rihs' artistic practice has been one that, rather than focusing on individual works, seeks to illuminate a fundamental inquiry: How does what we call "the world" come into being? And through what processes of perception, projection, and order is this world produced?

Perception, in this context, does not appear as direct access to reality, but rather as an active, selective, and structured process. Space, in this understanding, is not a neutral continuum, but a framework of decisions: gazes are directed, attention is distributed, meanings are assigned. In his early installations, Rihs highlights these mechanisms by confronting the viewer with their own perception. What appears as space proves to be a construction – dependent on individual predispositions as well as culturally learned patterns.

From this point, the inquiry shifts from individual perceptual space to collective world concepts. For Rihs, cartographic representations are not understood as neutral depictions, but rather as models that actively generate the world. By tracing world maps back to their underlying projection forms – cylinders, cones, geometric transformations – he reveals that every representation of the Earth necessarily relies on distortions. These distortions are not merely technical artifacts, but expressions of epistemic decisions: they determine what becomes visible, what takes center stage, and what is marginalized. The map thus becomes a conceptual model that reflects less the world itself than the conditions of its representability.

However, this insight into the constructed nature of the world does not lead Rihs to stabilize models, but rather to their dissolution. In his site-specific works, and particularly in his photographic fragmented images, perception itself is fragmented. Central perspective – historically one of the most powerful instruments for ordering space – loses its validity. It is replaced by a multitude of viewpoints that can no longer be assembled into a homogeneous whole. The "spherical perspective" is an expression of this shift: an image that no longer recognizes a fixed viewpoint, but instead places the viewer in an unstable field of relations.

With this fragmentation, another dimension comes to the fore: time. Each photographic fragment is tied to a specific moment; its montage creates an image that is organized not only spatially but also temporally. Perception here appears as a process of superimposition and condensation. In his portraits and family images, this logic is transferred to social structures: the family cannot be grasped as a static image, but only as a network of relationships that unfolds over time. Thus, time itself becomes a structure-forming category within perception.

With the "Garden Carpet" works, the focus shifts again – from the analysis of these processes to the development of his own models of order. The starting point is the idea of the garden as a world in miniature: a space where nature is not simply given, but shaped, structured, and symbolically charged. In the Islamic garden tradition, the garden appears as a miniature cosmos – a place where order becomes visible and tangible.

Rihs takes up this conceptual figure, but fundamentally transforms it. In the "Garden Carpets," vegetative structures – leaf veins, edges, growth forms – become diagrammatic elements. They are no longer mere representations of nature, but function as models of a different kind of order: an order that is not imposed from without, but emerges from internal differentiations. The plant here becomes the paradigm of a structural thinking that understands growth, branching, and variation as fundamental principles.

This shift is crucial: While the cartographic works model the world through projection and abstraction, the garden carpets develop a model of order that emerges from the logic of the organic itself. Nature no longer appears as an object of representation, but as a generator of form.

In his most recent works, this logic is transferred into real space. The vegetative structures are no longer depicted or modeled, but realized as walkable architectures. Thus, the artistic practice shifts from reflection to construction, creating spaces that not only address perception but actively shape it.

Leaf architecture functions as a structural principle. It organizes space not through rigid geometries, but through layering, permeability, and gradual transitions. In the Pestwurz Pavilion, this logic is translated into an architecture that places light, material, and movement in a dynamic relationship. Ghost Tree develops a membrane-like structure in which inside and outside are no longer clearly separated, but merge into one another. In Ombre Pétasite, the leaves appear as a growing, spreading formation – a spatial constellation reminiscent of familial or genealogical structures.

Here, another connection emerges: The family, which became visible as a temporally structured relationship in the photographic works, now reappears as a spatial organizational principle. Growth, branching, and proliferation can be read simultaneously as biological, social, and spatial processes. The plant thus becomes a kind of mediating figure between nature, structure, and social organization.

In Christoph Rihs' complete oeuvre, a continuous transformation can thus be observed: from the analysis of subjective perception, through the critique of cultural world models and the fragmentation of space and time, to the development of his own vegetatively organized architectures. This development does not follow a linear progression, but rather a successive shift in the central question – from observation to model formation and finally to spatial construction.

Nature, in this context, does not appear as a counter-design to technology, but as a conceptual principle of order that can be translated into cultural and artistic structures. Art, in this sense, becomes a second nature: an artificially created, yet structurally coherent framework that not only reflects perception but reorganizes it.

It is thus less a representation of the world than an instrument to make the conditions of its appearance visible and tangible.