Welcome to the website of assemblage sculptor Ribley!, a true polyvalent artist from Belgium. Indeed, before he specialized on assemblage art , Ribley! had been engaged in almost every other art form possible, as described in his biography. The artistic legacy of Ribley! comprises hundreds of works of different nature, such as essays and short stories, poems and plays, fairy tales and comic strips, instrumental music and songs, paintings and drawings, short films and photographs, chess compositions and boebbelograms, collages and sculptures, and even educational games and an encyclopedic work on the planet Mehlodia…
His early works were mostly created under the name of Boebbel or under pseudonyms such as Rickard Spermström , Ricardo B. , or Ribley , but most of his sculptures were created under the name of Ribley! .
The works of Ribley! are usually characterized by humour; you could say that he is a humorist who has specialized in different art forms to express himself. Ribley! tries to make people laugh, but at the same time makes them think about human society and its impact on our planet and its future. His works constantly question human values and standards; their character vary from funny to catchy, from amusing or entertaining to sarcastic or shocking.
The most important themes in his work are the weaknesses, vices and imperfections of mankind, such as vanity, over-confidence, abuse of power, stupidity, perversion, egoism, uprootedness, etc….
To make ends meet, Ribley! sometimes was obliged to take some odd jobs for a while. And so he was a salesman of funeral ware, a bank document snip master, a wine stock manager, a ballroom musician, and even a moral teacher to name just a few…
Ribley! could also not afford a large sculpture atelier and thus he had to use the small and uncomfortable cellar of his house as a workshop. And yet in spite of the difficult circumstances under which he had to work, Ribley! still managed to create fine pieces of contemporary figurative sculpture that can make people laugh or cry .
The workshop of Ribley! (1995)
HAHA
The works of Ribley! have not often been on exhibition yet, for the artist never sought for personal fame or glory and mainly wanted to preserve his works for the generations to come. Therefore, he preferred to design his own museum: the HUMORISTIC ASSEMBLAGE HALLS of ART or HAHA . The idea of the museum was to exhibit and to promote the humoristic assemblages of himself and of sculptors from all over the world. Unfortunately Ribley! could not find enough financial support to realize the Haha project. Therefore, he decided to design a virtual museum for the internet.
