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April 25 - May 24, 2003
Thomas Ruff: Stars
The New Objectivity
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05h12m/70 degree, 1990
Thomas Ruff
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Dipsacus laciniatus, ca 1920s
Karl Blossfeldt
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Untitled (Gargoyle), 1930
Albert Renger-Patzsch
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Varnisher, Cologne (Citizens of the 20th Century), ca 1930
August Sander
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Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery (PDNB) celebrates its 8th year in Dallas with a contemporary exhibition by an important German artist from the Dusseldorf Academy.
Thomas Ruff was born in the Black Forest (Zell am Harmersbach), Germany, 1958. He studied under Bernd Becher at the Staatlichen Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, and currently lives and works in Dusseldorf. He is perhaps most well known for his portrait series. The Modern Art Museum in Ft. Worth owns one from this series, it is a large color close up portrait of a young woman measuring 83 x 65 inches.
Students that have studied at this academy with Becher include Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky and Axel Hütte. Ruff has perhaps been one of the more diversified artists of the group. His series have ranged from his portraits to architectural studies, Internet pornography and night (Nächte) photographs.
The series that PDNB gallery is showing is entitled Sterne (Stars). These photographs were created between 1989 and 1992. Here is a selection from an interview between Philip Pocock and Thomas Ruff published in the Journal of Contemporary Art, 1993,
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Pocock: Why stars? Do they mean something extra special to you?
Ruff: When I was eighteen I had to decide whether to become an astronomer or a photographer. I also wanted to move the so-called künstlerische Fotografie boundary. Do you know Flusser?
Pocock: No.
Ruff: He defines isolated categories for photography that sometimes cross over. For example, if medical photography is used in a journalistic way, or with the Stars, a scientific archive isn’t used for scientific research but for my idea of what stars look like. It’s also a homage to Karl Blossfeldt. In the twenties he took photographs of plants to explain to his students architectural archetypes. So he was a researcher but the way he represented his intention with the help of photography made him an artist. I like these crossovers.
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Ruff worked with original copies of the 1212 negatives from the archives of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The photographs were taken of the night skies in the Southern Hemisphere in the Chilean Andes with a Schmidt telescope.
There are 8 prints (granolithographs) in this exhibition measuring approximately 35 x 25 inches.
Thomas Ruff’s exhibition history is quite extensive. A retrospective exhibition organized by the National Museum, Baden-Baden and is currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal. It will travel to the Tate Liverpool in July. His work is in many international museum collections including the Tate Gallery; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland. He was represented in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, 1995.
In the small gallery Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery will feature a small exhibition of Ruff’s influences and his contemporaries. Artists will include August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Karl Blossfeldt, and Candida Höfer.
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