Thomas Ruff 3D_ma.r.s.04, 2012, Nudes, Installation view and jpeg tj01, 2007
Thomas Ruff, Ma.r.s., March 8-April 21, 2012
Gagosian GalleryBritannia Street and Nudes, Davies Street
Gagosian Gallery presented two exhibitions of new and recent photographs by Thomas Ruff. This is his first exhibition with the gallery.
“The difference between my predecessors and me is that they believed to have captured reality and I believe to have created a picture. We all lost, bit by bit, the belief in this so-called objective capturing of real reality. Each of my series has a visual idea behind it, which I develop during my research. Sometimes the development follows a straight line from A to B; sometimes something completely new and interesting shows up, which makes me leave the straight path and follow a more indirect one with new rules”.
Thomas Ruff’s body of work testifies to the wealth of practices, objects and forms available to photographers today. He has been testing the limits of his medium for more than two decades, producing photographs in series with subjects that range from domestic interiors to the planets, from modernist architecture to abstract psychedelia, from specific portraits to generic internet pornography. The tools and techniques that he has investigated thus far include a composite picture-making apparatus, star light system for night-vision, hand-tinting, stereoscopy, digital retouching, and photomontage. He has appropriated images from various sources including scientific archives, newspapers, and, more recently, the internet.
Thomas Ruff was born in 1958. Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.