What a pleasant surprise. then to walk into Maryland Art Place and find that John Ruppert has taken this material and made it into sculptures that are graceful, light in feeling and even suggestive of melodious movement.

This is a medium that no doubt has its limitations, but Ruppert has shown uncommon imagination both in using it in the first place and in ways in which he has used it."
                                                                                                   John Dorsey
                                                                                                   The Baltimore Sun, June 1994

"The ease with which Ruppert uses industrial materials can be seen in some of the pieces that aren’t cast.  Three sculptures use chain-link fencing.   But instead of emphasizing its linearity of using it to seal off spaces, he shapes it into curved forms that create a complex rhetoric between inside and out, Chamber is an elegant bulb open at the top, inviting a mind’s - eye passage through it; the lacy shadow it casts on the floor ties it to the surrounding space.  For Ruppert, the fence pieces are about "grander forces of nature than you can really comprehend".

                                                                                                   Fred Camper
                                                                                                   The Chicago Reader, June 1996
 
 

"My interest in phenomena, both in my sources and in the way that I work….
is what compels me to make sculpture."

                                                                                                    John Ruppert