THOMAS RUFF
Stellar Landscapes
LWL-Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschicht, Münster | Kehrer
Since 1989, Thomas Ruff stopped taking and printing his own photographs in order to work with existing materials. His work is primarily concerned with questions that investigate the structure and content of the medium. Scientific images are the source material for all the photographs shown, and many of them were freely accessible via the internet. While Thomas Ruff's work for the stars series was limited to selecting details from photographs, he took a heavier hand in processing the source material in his new series: for the "cassini" and "ma.r.s". series, Thomas Ruff utilised pictures from various NASA missions. He digitally retouched them, altered the colours, manipulated contrast and cropping. Ruff's colouration of the original realistic, black and white pictures gives them a new character: they become painterly, aesthetic pictures whose abstract beauty serves as a surface for our imaginations.
More than any other contemporary artist, Thomas Ruff's work poses questions about the mass production of images. What can an image actually say today and in what ways do we read it? The purpose of image archives and the internet are also central themes of his work, as well as questions pertaining to contemporary artistic license.
Deutsch/english 2011, 144 pages, ISBN: 978-3-86828-261-0