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London, Thomas Ruff

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Thomas Ruff was born in 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany. The university colleague of Andreas Gursky studied photography in the 1970’s at the Stattlichen Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Bernd Belcher, and also acted there as a teacher from 2000 until 2006. His work is regularly shown in galleries and museums across the world and is included in many private and public collections. Thomas Ruff’s work from the 1980s and 1990s questioned the ‘truth-value’ of documentary images and in this period he also created the arresting series of portraits with which he has made his name. For these photographs Ruff took friends and fellow students as subjects, all of them wearing neutral clothing and putting on a neutral expression. By framing each subject like a passport photo against a plain background these images refuse to offer a psychological insight into his sitters. However, up to this day, Ruff works not just with portraiture but with many genres, creating photographic series’, which are constantly testing the limits of his medium. Ruff has not only experimented with a great wealth of practices, forms and objects but his subject matter also ranges from domestic interiors and modernist architecture to generic Internet pornography. To make his work, Ruff has adapted various methods ranging from photomontage to digital retouching, as well as the use of infrared lenses; he has also been appropriating images from various sources including scientific archives, the Internet and newspapers. This Thursday London’s Gagosian Galleries open their doors to celebrate the opening of this new exhibition of recent work by the internationally renowned photographer. This double-bill on display at the Gagosian Galleries tackles two very different objects for the viewer’s fantasy. For the nudes series, exhibited at the Davies Street gallery, Ruff downloads pornographic images from the Internet, taking them out of their original context and enlarging them as far as possible, transferring the crass, clear original images into blurry, painterly, suggestive hazes of pixels. Through Ruff’s manipulation, which is of entirely digital means, the sexual and aggressive nature of these depictions is toned down and the viewer’s visual access obstructed. The use of the blurring effect also unavoidably triggers an association with Gerhard Richter’s paintings derived from photographs; this throws photography’s enduring, unresolved relationship with painting into further questionning. nudes raises a wealth of issues such as authorship, artistic innovation and character as well as the legitimacy of appropriating foreign commercial material. m.a.r.s., Ruff’s other photographic series simultaneously on display at Gagosian’s gallery in Britannia Street, shows the fascination Ruff developed in his childhood for astronomy and the mysteries of the universe. In 2008 he created the cassini series which was based on photographic captures of Saturn and used images from the public Internet archive of NASA. For this new series Ruff adapted raw, black and white, fragmentary representations of the red planet, from the same source, interjecting them with colour to create giant, painterly C-type prints, and even rendering some of these distorted images in 3D. Ruff’s work, produced in the last two decades, continuously highlight one of photography’s most enduring qualities: the ability of capturing a certain place at a certain time transferring it into another. ‘Photography can only reproduce things’; this regularly cited statement by this remarkable artist, seems to indicate Ruff’s acknowledgement of his inability to fully control the viewer’s interpretation and reception of his photographs. And both projects, nudes and m.a.r.s., leave little doubt that Ruff accepts the personal reminiscences gathered by the viewer, as one of the inevitable characteristics of the medium of photography. He recognizes and even celebrates the inscription of aesthetic judgement and socio-cultural content of his photographs. nudes and m.a.r.s. leave the viewer to question whether these photographs really are only explorations of surfaces or whether they finally reveal what lies behind them. And it probably is this tension, between what we see and what we think we see, that holds the viewer captivated to Thomas Ruff’s art. Anna-Maria Pfab nudes Thomas Ruff Until April 21, 2012 17-19 Davies Street London W1K 3DE T. 44.207.493.3020 Hours: Mon-Sat 10-6 m.a.r.s. Thomas Ruff Until April 21, 2012 6-24 Britannia Street London WC1X 9JD T. 44.207.841.9960 Hours: Tue-Sat 10-6

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