Thomas Ruff
Whitechapel Gallery
27 Sept – 21 Jan 2018
This exhibition was the artist’s first major London retrospective and was curated by Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick. It featured his more recent works, spanning from 1979 to 2017, and was organised thematically. Among the themes explored were questions of scale, the cosmic, and the everyday.
Known for his critical and conceptual approach to photography, Thomas Ruff investigates subjects as diverse as utopianism, suburbia, advertising culture, pornography, and surveillance. The German artist began his career in the 1970s as a student at the renowned Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and from then until today he has worked in series, each defined by a distinct image-making technology. For this exhibition, he presented eighteen of these series.
“I just think that with one photograph you cannot explain the whole world, you have to make more photographs.” Thomas Ruff.
The photographs combined scenes of everyday life with vast cosmic views of the universe captured at an immense scale. The Art Berries performed alongside Sterne (Stars) (1989–92) — photographs taken through a high-performance telescope at the European Southern Observatory — evoking reflection on how small a part of the universe we are, and yet how deeply connected to everything else.
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