Galerist hosed internationally renowned German photographer Thomas Ruff’s first solo exhibition in Turkey through August 7, 2010.
The exhibition compiles five of Ruff’s collections that have had a great importance in his career path.
The key elements in his series “Nudes” are rooted in Internet pornography, while the colossal ‘Jpegs’ series contains massively enlarged images, including pixilated visuals downloaded from the Internet. “Substrat,” meanwhile, restructures the architecture of its origins in such a way that they transform into something completely new. “Sterne,” merges the disciplines of photography and astronomy, which are among the artist’s favorites. Finally, “Newspaper Photos” converts simple, clipped newspapers into amazing works of art.
With “Substrat,” Ruff uses digital tools on Japanese Manga pictures downloaded from the Internet to reshape them as abstract, metaphysical images. He magnifies them to extreme proportions until their anatomy can be seen with the naked eye. The revealed fluent colors and the dazzling puzzle they offer reach the deeper parts of the mind.
Ruff initiates a new abstract style in photography with “Substrat,” a fact emphasized by the fact that the works in the series explore the functioning principles of perception. With the images they present, they provoke an abundant world of references, questions, explanations and interpretations.
As its name implies, the main source of “Jpegs” are the most popular type of compressed images in the digital world. During the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Ruff was shooting photos in the region with his camera; later, however, he realized that all the images he had taken had been corrupted.
In response, he decided to search for and download similar images from the Internet. In addition to those, a wide range of resources, like old nuclear explosion visuals, old postcards and many photographs are brought together to be used in the series.
In order to highlight the digital roots of the visuals, Ruff enlarges the pixels and sometimes changes their colors. When the artwork is observed from a moderate range, the themes of the pictures can be identified. However, as the observer gets closer to them, they become more abstract and artistic.
Ruff digitally reshapes the low-resolution pornographic visuals downloaded from the internet, and extends them to bigger proportions with his artistic touch to create the “Nudes.” He thinks that the diversity of sensual fantasies that can be reached on pornographic Internet sites presents a more realistic portrayal of the existing digital age than the minimized and conventionalized figures of traditional nude pictures and naked fashion photographs.
On the other hand, he also reacts against the ordinariness of the pornographic images that can be found on the Internet in extreme quantities. As a result, after accumulating free images from websites, Ruff transforms these pixilated visuals, removes some of the details and constructs new compositions.
Ruff’s renowned series “Sterne” is inspired by one of his greatest passions, astronomy. He bought 29 × 29 cm negatives of night sky stars that were shot by the European Southern Observatory, the first time he had used existing visual materials. He then selected some sections, reproducing and enlarging them to 200 × 134 cm. The “Sterne” series, triggers a feeling similar to the one that can be experienced while observing the stars on a dark and cloudless night. They grab the viewer and take them inside to enjoy the enormous beauty of stars.
“Newspaper Photos,” meanwhile, will cover Galerist’s walls from one end to another in an exhibition representing a group of clipped photographs from German newspapers that Ruff assembled over a period of seven years.
The artist collected newspaper pieces that he found amusing or absurd, photographed them, separated them from their accompanying writings and manipulated them. When the images are abstracted from the headlines and body copies and framed as a singular entity, they create wider opportunities for different meanings.
The Ruff exhibition at Galerist presents a variety of photographs that carry references to his career’s diverse periods and will also provide the opportunity to read about the artist in detail.