In reconfiguring his practice, Ruckhäberle has leaned into another skillset: printmaking. As a student at the Academy of Visual Arts, he spent months learning lithograph etching, woodblocking and other printmaking techniques, giving him a greater appreciation for not only the possibilities of the craft, but also its limitations. 

“I was always more impressed with someone who makes a print with two or three colors that looks like a 20-color print, than with someone who creates a 50-color silkscreen that looks like it could have been done in four,” he says. “It was only some years after school that I realized that printmaking could be a partner to painting. It’s an important motor for new images because sometimes you’re a lot more radical in form and color than you would be with an oil painting, which is seemingly higher in the hierarchy.” 

It’s all about the process: taking the rigorous planning required for printmaking—in terms of placement, in terms of line, in terms of color—and transposing it to canvas. Consider a recent series of paintings of curvy, posing figures, set against blocks of color. To get a uniform flatness, Ruckhäberle first masked the background with tape, and filled the empty space that would become the figure with enamel. After they dried, he was able to work in reverse, covering the figure with tape so that he could fill the background without unintended overlap. “If you want to paint the figure, you have to work on the background, and the other way around… It’s not like [traditional] painting where you can just keep on changing things,” he says. “[I was] taking my images from painting and printmaking, and back, and then trying to develop the images through those changes.”