Thomas Ruff

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Thomas Ruff bigraphy, stories - German photographer

Thomas Ruff : biography

10 February 1958 –

Thomas Ruff (born 10 February 1958) is a German photographer who lives and works in Düsseldorf.

Selected exhibitions

Ruff has exhibited widely since his first gallery show at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich, in 1981. His work has appeared in Documenta 9 (1992), the Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005), the Biennale of Sydney (1996), and the Bienal de São Paulo (2002).

  • 1988 Schloss Hardenberg, Velbert, Germany
  • 1988 Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany
  • 1992 documenta IX, Kassel, Germany
  • 1995 Venice Biennale, Italy
  • 2000 Museum Haus Lange, Frankfurt, Germany
  • 2001 Chabot Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands
  • 2001 Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany
  • 2002 Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany; Städtische Galerie Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany
  • 2002 Artium Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporaneo, Vitoria (Gasteiz), Spain
  • 2003 Fundação de Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal
  • 2003 Tate Liverpool, Great Britain
  • 2003 Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany
  • 2003 Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, Busan, South Korea
  • 2004 Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea
  • 2007 Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
  • 2008 Mücsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary
  • 2009 Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany
  • 2009 Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires
  • 2009 Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy
  • 2011 Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
  • 2012 Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany

Honors

  • 2006 Infinity Award for Art, International Center of Photography, New York
  • 1988 Förderpreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen für junge Künstler
  • 1990 Dorothea von Stetten-Kunstpreis, Kunstmuseum Bonn
  • 2003 Hans-Thoma-Preis, Hans-Thoma-Museum, Bernau

Collections

His work is held in the collections of many major museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof– Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Art Institute of Chicago; Essl Museum, Klosterneuberg; Dallas Museum of Art; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Life and career

Thomas Ruff, one of six children, was born in 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach in the Black Forest, Germany. In the summer of 1974, Ruff acquired his first camera and after attending an evening class in the basic techniques of photography he started to experiment, taking shots similar to those he had seen in many amateur photography magazines. Tate Liverpool.

During his studies in Düsseldorf and inspired by the lectures of Benjamin HD Buchloh, Ruff developed his method of conceptual serial photography. Ruff began photographing landscapes, but while he was still a student he transitioned to the interiors of German living quarters, with typical features of the 1950s to 1970s. This was followed by similar views of buildings and portraits of friends and acquaintances from the Düsseldorf art and music scene, initially in small formats.

Ruff studied photography from 1977 to 1985 with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Art Academy), where fellow students included the photographers Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, Angelika Wengler, and Petra Wunderlich. In 1982, he spent six months at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. In 1993, he was a scholar at Villa Massimo in Rome.

Commenting on his influences, Ruff said, "My teacher Bernd Becher, showed us photographs by Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz and the new American colour photographers."Leo Benedictus (11 June 2009), The Guardian. From 2000 to 2005, Ruff taught Photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Portraits

In his studio between 1981 and 1985, Ruff photographed 60 half-length portraits in the same manner: Passport-like images, with the upper edge of the photographs situated just above the hair, even lighting, the subject between 25 and 35 years old, taken with a 9 × 12 cm negative, and because of the use of a flash without any motion blur. The early portraits were black-and-white and small, but Ruff soon switched to color, using solid backgrounds in different colors; from a stack of colored card stock the sitter could choose one color, which then served as the background. Gagosian Gallery. The resulting Portraits depict the individual persons framed as in a passport photo, typically shown with emotionless expressions, sometimes face-on, sometimes in profile, and in front of a plain background. UBS Art Collection, Zurich. Ruff began to experiment with large-format printing in 1986, ultimately producing photographs up to seven by five feet in size (210 × 165 cm). Guggenheim Collection. By 1987 Ruff had distilled the project in several ways, settling on an almost exclusive use of the full frontal view and enlarging the finished work to monumental proportions. MoMA Collection. Because he found the effect of the colors too dominate in these, he chose a light and neutral background for the portraits he made between 1986 and 1991. Gagosian Gallery. In a discussion with Philip Pocock (Journal for Contemporary Art, 1993), Ruff mentions a connection between his portraits and the police observation methods in Germany in the 1970s during the German Autumn. Indeed, while experimenting with composite faces in 1992, Ruff came across the Minolta Montage Unit, a picture generating machine, used by the German police in the 1970s to generate phantom pictures. Through a combination of mirrors, four portraits, fed into the machine, produce one composite picture. Ruff started out reconstructing faces but soon found it more interesting to construct artificial faces, which often combine features of men and women, that do not, but could conceivably, exist in reality; this resulted in his "Anderes Porträt" series (1994-1995). Phillips de Pury & Company, New York.