ABOUT

Steven Ribuffo is an artist whose work explores the instability of visual information. Working across photography, collage, printmaking, drawing, and painting, Ribuffo treats images not simply as representations, but as materials—layering, fragmenting, reconstructing, and obscuring them until familiar forms begin to shift toward abstraction.

Ribuffo’s practice began with digital photographic collage in the early 2000s and developed through his studies in graphic design and printmaking. These disciplines continue to inform his approach to composition, structure, typography, and material. Photographs can function as paint; text can become image; architectural forms can become lines, shapes, and fields of texture.

Ribuffo’s work often begins with existing visual information—photographs, found materials, text, architectural forms, or marks—which he fragments, accumulates, and reconstructs into new relationships. His photographic works in particular draw from specific places, journeys, and periods of time, compressing disparate visual fragments into singular images that echo the way memory collapses moments, places, and impressions into a single, imperfect whole. Across media, his compositions are built through a tension between structure and emergence: Ribuffo establishes constraints through source imagery, physical supports, geometry, typography, and accumulation, then responds to the relationships that develop within them.

The resulting works occupy a space between representation and abstraction. Fragments of architecture, objects, bodies, text, and photographic space remain perceptible while their identities are continually interrupted by the larger composition. Titles often provide a subtle point of entry, redirecting the meaning of what remains recognizable without fully resolving it. His work asks what happens when an image becomes too dense to fully resolve, yet remains too recognizable to disappear entirely.

Ribuffo earned a BFA from Purchase College in 2010 and has worked professionally as a graphic designer since graduation. He currently works as an Associate Creative Director. Alongside his studio practice, he is a co-founder and organizer of an artist-run exhibition collective that has produced independent gallery pop-ups since 2023, collaborating with artists to curate, produce, promote, and present exhibitions.

His studio practice remains in dialogue with his design background: where design traditionally organizes information to facilitate communication, his artwork uses organization to explore what happens when that hierarchy begins to break down.

Surviving, December 2025
On the Fringe NYC, 72 Warren St, Tribeca

Up All Night, June 2025
On the Fringe NYC, 72 Warren St, Tribeca

F5, September 2024
On the Fringe NYC, 72 Warren St, Tribeca

In Layers, September 2023
On the Fringe NYC, 72 Warren St, Tribeca

Art Apple Inaugural Group Show, July 2019
Art Apple NYC, 1427 DeKalb Ave, Brooklyn

Split, October 2013
Danny Screams Gallery, 220 Leonard St, Brooklyn

Trashion Pt 2, September 2009
Gallery 151, 350 Bowery, Manhattan

Past EXHIBITIONS