This exhibition was the artist’s first major London retrospective and was curated by Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick. It included his more recent works from 1979 to 2017 and was organised thematically. Some of the themes explored included questions of scale, the cosmic and the everyday.
Known for taking a critical, conceptual approach to photography, Ruff explores themes 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 art school Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, and from the 1970s to today has worked in series for which he uses different image-making technologies. He presented 18 series for this art exhibition.
“I just think that with one photograph you cannot explain the whole world, you have to make more photographs.” Thomas Ruff.
I didn’t visit this exhibition, but the other berries did and took some brilliant photos that I am sharing with you here. You can see pictures of everyday life mixed with some cosmic views of the universe taken in a huge scale. Raspberry and Blackberry performed alongside Sterne (Stars) (1989–92), photographs taken by a high-performance telescope at the European Southern Observatory, and you can think about what a small part of the universe we are and how connected we are to everything else.