Presentation joey weber

Thomas Ruff Ruff attended the Staatlichen Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 1977 to 1985, Bernd and Hilla Becher, known for their series of typological photographs cataloging the full range of abandoned industrial structures.

In a wide range of photographic series, Ruff has moved from straight photography in the 1980s to employing found images in the ‘90s and, more recently, 3D imagery.

“I make investigations that ask people to become aware of what they are looking at,” says the artist Thomas Ruff, one among the most influential living photographers today. Ruff’s conceptual work magnifies and re-examines cultural anecdotes and phenomena through a range of eclectic images and series, including depictions of residential interiors, abstracted architectures, conceptual portraits, astral landscapes using images captured by NASA, and manipulations of digital images culled from the Internet.

Ruff first gained notice as a photographer with his contemplative images of abandoned German buildings, which he began showing in gigantic color prints in the 1980s. Ruff chose vivid color to highlight the beauty in destroyed surroundings. In his “Interieurs� series, an ongoing project begun in 1979, he photographs the homes of friends and family members in bright color and intense detail, often cropping the image in a wry, suggestive manner.

Ruff’s famed portrait series examines expressionless faces from the chest up, starkly considering how we view and understand others. The photographer achieved international acclaim with this series, and the work has been collected by many major museums. Later, Ruff began to utilize more advanced technology to develop this conceit further, using the Minolta Montage—a police device that can blend together suspects’ faces—to make invented portraits.

In the 1990s, Ruff increasingly turned to repurposing images found from the countless pictures on the Internet. For one series, he abstracted images of Japanese manga; elsewhere, for his famous “Nudes” series, Ruff found pornographic images on the Internet and distorted them until they were only vaguely recognizable. The blurred or fuzzy images look forever caught in motion, slightly abstracted—becoming more about the act of looking than content of the illicit images themselves.

Ruff has made multiple series that deal with outer space. “Sterne” (1989– 1992), takes telescope photographs of stars from the European Southern Observatory in the Chilean Andes, turning them into mere white dots against a black background. For “cassini” (2008/2009) he appropriated interplanetary images from NASA’s website, blowing up these images of planets and galaxies into sizes so massive that the original message is completely reinvented; in the series “ma.r.s.” (2010), he did the same with digital images taken of the surface of the planet. Originally in black and white, the images have been rendered in color and with altered perspectives by Ruff—and some in 3D, no less.

In this decidedly otherworldy piece, from a project entitled Cassini, Ruff manipulated an image returned from the Cassini spacecraft, which has toured the planet Saturn. Ruff’s infusion of saturated color renders the planet in an abstracted, graphic manner.

For his “Jpegs” series, Ruff created huge works from images found on the Internet, again blown up until they reach the point of abstraction, appearing entirely as pixels. More recently Ruff has taken this line of thinking even further for his “zycles” series, in which he uses algorithms to create computer-generated abstractions of magnetic fields. The resulting wild loops and lines only vaguely suggest their highly ordered origins. In “photograms,” he reenvisioned the process favored by Surrealists, who would place abstract shapes on photo-sensitive paper with unexpected results. Instead, Ruff created software to imitate the effect with more control over composition and color, creating the illusion of experimentation.

Ruff essentially takes an idea that was first introduced my artists like Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who simply placed objects of various shapes, textures and opacities onto photographic paper and captured their physical qualities through the optical traces they left on the light sensitive surface of the paper. But what those artists managed to achieve through light and the chemical processes in the 1920’s, Ruff creates using all-digital means. So, what you see actually doesn’t exist.

jpg as01 from: Jpegs II, 2008 rendered almost illegible by intensifying its pixels, the image’s suggestions of having a documentary purpose are undermined. By presenting the viewer with a scene that frustrates any ability to discern details or even make visual sense of its contents, Ruff challenges the preconception that today’s images and our burgeoning visual archives are reliable witnesses to events and our world.

Exhibitions 1988 Schloss Hardenberg,Velbert, Germany 1988 Porticus Frankfurt, Germany 1992 documenta IX, Kassel, Germany 1995 Venice Biennale, Italy 2000 Museum Haus Lange, Frankfurt, Germany 2001 Chabot Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands 2001 Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany 2002 Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany; St채dtische Galerie Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany 2002 Artium Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporaneo,Vitoria (Gasteiz), Spain 2003 Casa de Serralves-Museu de Arte Contempor창nea, Porto, Portugal 2003 Tate Liverpool, Great Britain 2003 Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany 2003 Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, Busan, South Korea