Space by Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff is a German photographer born in 1958. He studied in Düsseldorf and still works there. Continuing to question the photographic medium through technological advances, Thomas Ruff’s work is articulated in serial conceptual photographs. Between 1977 and 1985 Ruff studied the art of photography with Berndt and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth. In 1993 he obtains a scholarship to enter Villa Massimo in Rome.

He begins by photographing the interior of his German houses and apartments and continues with a series of protocolary portraits. Its method, very standardized, removes from the images the elements impeding its readability. Passionate about astronomy, it is from 1989 that it produces the series Sterne, based on the images of night skies collected at the European observatory of Chile. Thomas Ruff selects a detail of the image and magnifies it to its optimal size. In 2003, he published a series of Nudes nudes accompanied by texts by Michel Houellebecq.

Later he produced his series Cassini and Ma.r. In which he reinterprets digital images of Saturn or the Mars planet from NASA. Thomas Ruff’s work can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.