Alsatian Village By Etienne Ritter (1934-1994)

Oil on canvas representing an Alsatian village with abstract lines. Very good condition, Signed lower right Dimensions of the frame 37 x 70 cm Dimensions of the oil  22 x 55 cm Delivery by colissimo with reinforced protection, allow 30 euros for France, 40 euros for Europe. Contact me at 0678876161 or 0243446489 Etienne Ritter (1934-1994) Self-taught painter born on February 17, 1934 in Alsace, in Sondernach, at the bottom of the Munster valley, very early on drawing, and especially painting, were his main concerns. At eleven, he made his first oil paintings. From 1957 he had the immense joy of being able to devote himself entirely to painting. Amazed by the enchantment of colors, spontaneously, intuitively, he obeys deep, inexplicable, indefinable and mysterious impulses. Étienne Ritter's favorite subjects are the villages of Alsace, in spring or under the snow, bouquets of flowers (poppies, sunflowers, daisies, wildflowers), still lifes, Vosges landscapes in the warm colors of autumn, but also more abstract compositions or more unusual seascapes of blue. The evolution of his painting, very figurative in its beginnings, essentially with the brush, then goes through a period of cubism, then of research and mixtures of colors where the knife takes all its place, to arrive at its personality and its fullness in the years 1975 to 1990. In the last years of his life, diminished by his illness, his painting reflects the physical and moral suffering of the painter, who is moving towards colder colors, increasingly poor in material. Etienne Ritter exhibited all over the world including Colmar, Mulhouse, Strasbourg, Metz, Paris, Brussels, Montreal, Dallas. and received numerous prizes in Sarreguemines, Pont-Aven, Deauville, Cassis. Art critics will be numerous and positive: “Deeply attached to his land, Ritter never ceases to find his inspiration there. And he recreates this universe in a generous material, with ample rhythms, with a dazzling palette whose warm dominant colors, combined with whites, harmonize with rare blues and precious greens. » « The landscapes of Alsace, even those of winter, are always intensely luminous, the flowers of an expressive force which knows how to combine the research of colors with the virtues and the decorative necessities... » « Stripped and rich at the same time , instinctive as well as studied, familiar and, at the same time, wildly proud, the Art of E. Ritter appears, in this era when almost everything is artificial, as one of the last islands of figurative, natural and vigorous, traditional painting...