Thomas Ruff

The exhibition in Haus der Kunst is the first comprehensive presentation of the works of Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) in more than ten years. It chronologically tracks his artistic development.

It shows groups of works that made Ruff famous internationally in the 1980s, like his series of interiors, or the portraits whose creative concept contradicted traditional convention that states that a successful portrait must offer a psychologizing interpretation. Ruff’s realistic and punctilious presentation of the surface of expressionless faces changed the perception of photographic portraits. 

Ruff’s paintings are remarkable for their size and perfect technique. In the past thirty years, the artist has continuously taken on formal as well as technical aspects of analogue and digital photography. And for various series, he also adopted foreign materials that he processed and introduced to the visual arts. Ruff’s current series shows the surfaces of Mars, which he took from the NASA website and translated into images of a fragile beauty.