Thomas Ruff, works 1979 - 2011

"Thomas Ruff (born in 1958), from the Becher class of internationally renowned photo artists, is a master of conceptual photography. His work, which contains neither narrative nor anecdotal moments and makes equal use of analog and digital production techniques, is an expression of a thoroughly scientific working method, which dissects its object, reassembles it and in so doing combines analysis and original creation. He became known in the 1980s with oversized and hyperrealist color portraits of his friends and fellow students at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. It was he who discovered the Diasec process for photography, a method borrowed from advertising of framing photographic prints and thus liberating the photograph from the ghetto of print cabinets. Since then, large-format photographic works have been proudly displayed on museum and gallery walls worldwide. [Title] presents selected photographs from all of the artist's series to date, starting with his small Interiors and large Portraits, to the starry skies and night shots, the nudes, recycled from pornographic material he found on the Internet, and abstract Substrates, to his stellar compositions based on astronomical photographs from ESO and NASA."--P [4] of cover