Christoph Ruckhäberle makes paintings with a reputation for melancholy—a quality often associated with artistic greatness. Before 2006, Ruckhäberle's pictures looked downright gloomy. Yet, unlike most of his contemporaries in the German painting movement known as The New Leipzig School, he put this characteristic behind him by expanding his interests in bright color, humor, pattern, and ornament. With their awkward gestures and oddly twisted limbs, his subjects tend to resemble marionettes in a puppet show: frozen in time and mid-movement, isolated and bored. Imbued with a post-hippie vibe that exalts closeness to nature, a folk-art aesthetic, and a proto-European earthy contemplativeness, Ruckhäberle's figures always find new adventures while creating private mythologies in cult-like groups. These colorful artworks combine sensual and earthly joie de vivre with their spiritual ideals in forms like peasant women, circus figures, or free wanderers. The resulting images are curiously accessible yet confrontational, engaging, and challenging, as well.