In Ruth Campau's second solo exhibition Chicago Mountains at Gether Contemporary she presents an extensive installation.

Large painted dibond plates spanning almost from floor to ceiling makes up a freestanding structure a kin to a card house, taking up the entire gallery space

The top surfaces of the triangular shapes are painted with Campau's precise and characteristic brush strokes, where the acrylic colour impasto is spread out onto the surface creating the great brush's heavy structures of deep creases and rich overflows of colour. The expressive topside is countered by an underside of mirrors which, due to the triangular structure allude, each other creating an infinity of spaces that alternately close together and open up to new perceptual spaces.

On the one hand, we are faced with a great physical presence of the intense color of its strokes, which emphasizes the surface that is so concrete and the place it is in space, the moment we experience it. On the other hand, we are faced with a volatile illusion, whose reality changes from moment to moment by virtue of the constantly changing mirror of itself, and the space occupied by the viewer.

The installation becomes an image of contradictions and refractory surfaces, which the paradoxical in the exhibition's title "Chicago Mountains" also refers to. The only thing that breaks the city of Chicago's otherwise flat geography are the colossal skyscrapers, and thus the people who have built them and make up the city.

Here is also a reference to one of the city's children, Judy Chicago, whose epochal triangular work from 1979, The Dinner Party, inspired generations of female artists.

With "Chicago Mountains", Ruth Campau refers to her artistic role models, while the exhibition also becomes a summary and a manifestation of her artistic praxis, and the central elements that characterize her work.