Rita McBride born in Des Moines in 1960. She lives and works between Los Angeles and Dusseldorf.

Many people consider Rita McBride a sculptor, and indeed, she has produced many sculptural objects. Her work reintroduce forms that are often overlooked in our built environment, she transforms their typical materials or shifts their scale to explore the tensions between functionalism and formalism. She is always interested in things that are losing their original function, fascinated by the moment in which the object is still intact as a recognizable literally device, but has the possibility to become something else. Looking for these shifts in time, where things are liberated from one function and then can be reconsidered aesthetically, or critically, or socially—that’s pretty much a motivation for all of her works.
Nonetheless, her work is not primarily about objects as such. She is concerned with the situations and settings that emerge from objects, including performance and text, as well as actions and fictions that occur with and around objects.

The specific relation of McBride’s art can be summed up as design, architecture, and public space.

The synthesis of sculptural objects and other artistic media - a synthesis that often involved relationship between structure and events is a general feature of McBride’s work. The majority of her works, after the popular piece Arena have been presented for the first time in 1997, are inspired by the possibility of an “activation” and almost all her exhibitions featured printed materials that direct the visitors toward a planned activity. Matter of fact, the another central factor of her practise is precisely the intensive communication with other artist, both from her own field and another artistic disciplines. In any McBride’s work there is a recognizable common element which is a rigorously demanding awareness of the public dimension in today’s world, and an equally demanding call for public participation in significant aspects of artistic reflection.