Thomas Ruff

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Thomas Ruff, 2007

Thomas Ruff (born February 10, 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach ) is a German photo artist from Düsseldorf .

Life

Thomas Ruff studied photography from 1977 to 1985 with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy . Ruff sees himself u. a. influenced by Walker Evans , Eugène Atget , Karl Blossfeldt , Stephen Shore and William Eggleston . In 1999 he received the professorship for photography at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he headed the photography class from 2000 to 2006, the former "Becher class", which is considered an important group of photographic art under the name of Düsseldorf Photo School .

During his studies he began his practice of conceptual photography in series; The topic was interiors, interior views of German living spaces with typical furnishings from the 1950s to 1970s (room views and details). This was followed by portraits and views of buildings. The portraits usually show oversized passport photos of people from Ruff's circle of friends in high detail and with a serious look. In a conversation with Philip Pocock ( Journal of Contemporary Art , 1993) Ruff draws a connection between this series of portraits and the police surveillance methods in the 1970s in the context of professional bans and RAF terrorism . Thomas Ruff's photos of the building are also distant and processed with the computer to remove disruptive details - a typifying procedure that gives the views an exemplary character. (Ruff: "Such buildings represent more or less ideology and business in the Federal Republic of Germany in the last thirty years.") With regard to light, perspective and location, the recording technology is standardized. From 1989 these series were followed by photographs of the starry sky that were not based on his own photographs. In the years from 1992 to 1995, night shots (nocturnal exterior and building views) were made with a night vision device that was apparently used deliberately in analogy to military operations and espionage operations. From 1994 to 1996 he made stereo photographs . Another series from the 1990s are the “newspaper photos”; Similar to the star photographs, Ruff uses photographs of others here. He used newspaper clippings which he enlarged without the original subtitle.

In 2003 Thomas Ruff published the photo book Nudes with a text by the French writer Michel Houellebecq . In this case, Ruff's recordings are based on porn photos from the Internet , which he manipulates with the help of electronic image processing. His exhibition in Münster (2011) is called “Stellar Landscapes”. For this, the artist edited a total of 60 NASA images of Mars in such a way that the viewer sees the landscape as if from an airplane window.

Since 2012 Thomas Ruff has been working with the 3D expert Wenzel S. Spingler on a new series called »Photograms«. These refer to the historical photogram , but were created completely digitally through the simulation of a virtual darkroom and some of them were rendered with the Juropa supercomputer from Forschungszentrum Jülich . This creates a purely virtual, large-format, colored shadow image. The photo series was exhibited in 2014 in the David Zwirner Gallery in New York, the SMAK in Ghent and the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf , in the first institutional solo exhibition in his hometown.

Since 2014 he has been working on the series »Negative«, in which, through digital inversion, historical, analog photographs of files, portraits, painting studios, landscapes, etc. a. can be converted into cyan in their typical sepia tone and printed as "negatives" similar to the cyanotype .

Exhibitions (selection)

Prices (selection)

literature

Movie

  • "Thomas Ruff - Photography 1979-2011" Documentary, Germany, 2011, 50 min., Director: Ralph Goertz, Production: IKS - Institute for Art Documentation and Scenography, DVD Edition, Premiere: Reel Artists Film Festival Toronto. The film accompanies Thomas Ruff for two years and gives deep insights into his way of thinking and working.
  • The photo artist Thomas Ruff. Documentary, Germany, 2012, 50 min., Director: Maria Anna Tappeiner, production: WDR , first broadcast: April 1, 2012 in 3sat , summary by 3sat.
    The film outlines Ruff's work on the occasion of the preparations for a retrospective at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ LWL-Landesmuseum Münster Accessed on November 12, 2011.
  2. ↑ LVZ-Online.de, DPA ( Memento of the original from August 19, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Website of the Leipziger Volkszeitung. Retrieved September 23, 2011. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / nachrichten.lvz-online.de
  3. ↑ Villa Massimo | Borse di studio. Retrieved August 22, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Ruff, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photographer and artist
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Zell am Harmersbach