A student of Bernd Becher at the Kunstakedemie in Dusseldorf, Thomas Ruff is among the leading figures in the younger generation of German photographers. His photographs have been extensively exhibited in the United States and Europe. With his show of Portraits, Houses, and Stars in 1989-1990, Ruff became one of the youngest artists to be honored with a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The show has travelled to the Centre National d'Art Contemporain - Magasin in Grenoble and is currently on exhibit at the Kunsthalle in Zurich.
Ruff will show large-scale, color photographs documenting the constellations of stars. Like his previous bodies of works, Ruffs Stars are an investigation into the reach and limits of photography as a mode of knowledge. The photograph's astringently cool presentation only serves to underscore the alien beauty of the images.
Ruffs photographs partake of the artistic, theological, and philosophical traditions which posit the stars as mystic, heavenly, and transcendent, but simultaneously they resist such metaphysical interpretations and romantic generalizations. Instead, Ruffs photographs appear detached and scientific. Yet even this scientism is elusive, perhaps duplicitous. Rather than dispassionately recording meaningful information, Ruffs photographs transmit the constellations as surface pattern of black and white, and that opaque surface remains ineluctably that of the photographic print. Ultimately, like his previous series, Ruffs stars imply a critique of photographic genres.