Ivo Ringe

Ivo Ringe (born 5 July 1951) is a German artist and curator. His painting has been classified as minimalism, geometric abstraction, concrete art, and hard-edge painting. Ringe lives and works in Cologne, Germany. He is a member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund (Association of German Artists).

Biography Ringe was born on 5 July 1951 in Bonn, Germany, to Erich and Edith Ringe (née Kleemann). His father was an inventor and his mother, a survivor of the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Ringe grew up in a refugee camp between the villages of Vilich and Schwarzrheindorf, in the district of Bonn.

At age 15, Ringe left home by himself and travelled to Paris, France, where he lived on the streets and learned painting and screen printing. During the late 1960s, Ringe designed and printed posters for local theatres, clubs, and musicians.

In 2011, Ringe became an adjunct professor with the studio for fine arts ("Atelier für Bildende Kunst") at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn; and from 2014 until 2025, he was the studio’s artistic director..

Ringe lives and works in Cologne, Germany, and is married to the American artist, Heather Sheehan. At age 32, he began the practice of Transcendental Meditation.

Ringe’s painting has been described as minimal art, akin to Imi Knoebel and Blinky Palermo, who were also Beuys’ students.

The characteristic feature of Ringe’s paintings is the precisely balanced colours, which are gesturally painted in broad strokes that stretch across the canvas in a net-like manner, creating irregular triangles and quadrangles.

Art critic Thomas Micchelli notes that “Among the more intriguing aspects of Ringe’s work is the thoroughness of its self-analysis: nothing, not even randomness, is done without a reason.” Ringe responded to the sonnet with the creation of four screen prints.

Since 1976, Ringe’s work has been exhibited internationally in over 250 solo and group shows at galleries and museums. In his work as curator, he further establishes the phenomenon of the vibrational aspects of organic structures towards an expansion of the strict geometry in minimalism and concrete art. Ringe’s artwork is in notable European museum and gallery collections, as well as private and corporate art collections.