Thomas RUFF

Arario Gallery is pleased to present an opportunity for the public to experience the extraordinary pictorial world of Thomas RUFF, spanning from the early 90s to today, in an exhibition to be held from May 28 to August 22. Since appearing in the international stage in the mid-80s with his portrait series, RUFF has built a unique world of photography involving such themes as nudes, Substrate, Sterne, architecture, newspaper photographs (Zeitungsfotos), and posters (Plakate). The exhibition at Arario will display not only some of his best-known works such as Porträts, Sterne, and nudes, but also his most recent works. Specially included is the new series m.d.p.n., for which he photographed the fish market designed by the famous architect Luigi Cosenza in Naples in 1929.

In m.d.p.n. RUFF applied the method he had used on another architecture project involving works created by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (l.m.v.d.r.). He employs digital technology to create a hybrid image of the market as it appears today and images of the building in its original form and in a primitive urban context, using a sophisticated series of cross-references between past and present. In m.d.p.n. he combined, as he had done in l.m.v.d.r., his own photographs and archive photographs in a series, and treated them in the same way, generating a new and autonomous image of classical architecture.

Born in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany in 1958, Ruff is one of the most recognized students of Bernd and Hilla Becher in the Dusseldorf Academy. Since his graduation from the Academy, he has continued to experiment with various techniques and approached the medium of photography from a broad perspective. Under the assumption that “photography can only capture the surface of things,” RUFF has been experimenting the limits of medium, creating sixteen series in the process. He explains that photography only pretends to show reality. When it comes to picture perfectness, you recognize it, but at the same time, it is not. The works does not imply a direct interpretation of our reality but a manipulative “second reality,” the image of an image which opens up to different kinds of layers of reality through his artistic research. Even if the works don’t appear to state a comment towards certain issues such as social politics or art history, however, working in series, especially for the nudes and portraits, has a quality of reflecting matters of his own generation. The works to be presented in the Arario exhibition are some of his best-known and most recognized, including nine series out of his total sixteen.

One of the main driving forces that allowed RUFF to be so successful in so many genres of photography is his experimental spirit, which leads him into works where he can deal with fresh ideas and new media as opposed to documentary where he has to focus on the real world.

RUFF’s works have been widely exhibited in such venues as Tate Liverpool (2003), Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2004), Kunsthalle Baden- Baden, Germany (2001), and the Center for Contemporary Art in Malmö, Sweden (1996).