Thomas Ruff
Lichten (Lighting)
20 September 2014–11 January 2015
Opening: Friday 19 September, 7pm
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
Grabbeplatz 4
D-40213 Düsseldorf
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday and
public holidays 11–18h
T +49 211 89 96 243
F +49 211 89 29 168
mail [at] kunsthalle-duesseldorf.de
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is presenting an exhibition of works by German photographer Thomas Ruff (born 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach), one of the central figures of the Düsseldorf School of Photography. Lichten (Lighting) brings together images from the past 35 years taken from five groups of work that date from the late 1970s until today. The works take a range of strategies from the semi-documentary to the post-digital, and use various types of lighting from the natural to the virtual.
Central to the exhibition are two recent groups of work: “phg” (since 2012), which is a virtual simulation of the classical genre of the photogram, and “Negative” (since 2014), in which Ruff goes back to the origins of photography in the 19th century. Works from “Sterne” (Stars, 1989–1992), “Nächte” (Nights, 1992–1996) and Ruff’s earliest series, “Interieurs” (1979–1983), will also be shown. Technical considerations, translated into shots of the starry sky, of the urban periphery taken with a low-light amplifier, and of domestic still lifes provide a political and social view of the function of images. In its historical span, this exhibition crosses the boundaries of analogue photography in the light of the apparently unlimited possibilities of contemporary image production.
Instead of photographing our everyday reality, Ruff concentrates on the depiction of photographic reality. His approach is based on the methods of so-called “researcher-artists.” In each of his series, Ruff uses the medium of photography as an instrument of systematic analysis that can be used to aid in the examination of social, political and aesthetic aspects of image production, and thus the history of modernism. The as yet unresolved question of the essence of light is concretised as a leitmotif of the exhibition. In every series, light takes on a different task: the understated presentational lighting of German post-war home decor (“Interieurs”), the relationship between space and time (“Sterne”), and artificially created artefacts (the photograms of “phg”). The latter series raises again the question of the indexical nature of photography.
One of Ruff’s “phg” series was produced in cooperation with the Forschungszentrum Jülich research institute in North Rhine-Westphalia. Because the institute’s supercomputers reached the limits of their capability while performing this task, Ruff’s works also can be interpreted indirectly as portraits of technology. This cooperation between an artist, a museum and a research institute also offers a new model for the collaboration of art and science.
The exhibition was designed by Martin Germann of S.M.A.K. in Ghent and Gregor Jansen of Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, in close cooperation with Thomas Ruff.
Exhibition catalogue
A catalogue with contributions by Philippe Van Cauteren, Robert Fleck, Gregor Jansen, Thomas Ruff, Wenzel S. Spingler, Valeria Liebermann and Martin Germann has been published in cooperation with ROMA, Amsterdam.
