German photo artist Thomas Ruff is a master of conceptual serial photography. He made a name for himself in the early eighties with oversized, superrealistic color portraits of his artist friends and as a pioneer of the Diasec process used to mount photographic images onto acrylic glass, thereby obviating frames, liberating photography from the print gallery and paving the way to the grand gallery museum walls for large-format photos. This collection presents selected works from Thomas Ruff's large-format series, beginning with his small Interiors, the large Portraits, his Architectural Photos, the Starry Skies, his abstract Substrata, the Nudes, which make use of pornographic material taken from the internet, and finally his latest creation: Stellar Landscapes. The book features essays by Thomas Weski and Okwui Enwezor and appears in conjunction with an extensive Thomas Ruff retrospective exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
|