The Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation is pleased to announce the first retrospective exhibition in Italy dedicated to the German photographer Thomas Ruff. The retrospective includes a significant selection of works from Ruff’s most famous series, among these: the Portraits in small and large format, with the variant of the Blue Eyes; the Nights, the more recent Nudes and Machines, until the latest JPeg presented at the last edition of the Venice Biennale. Known to the public since the middle Eighties for his big portraits of students of his age, the German artist has been a skilled experimenter of the photographic means and of its several possible variations since ever. Ruff distinguishes himself from other photographers of his same generation – often joined under the name of “Dusseldorf School” - for his very ability and resolution in revolutionize the method and the photographic language: what determines new explorations and unexpected linguistic solutions are the very objects. Starting from the notion that photography is able to catch only the surface of things, “the authenticity of a pre-established and manipulated reality”, Ruff concentrates his interest in rearranging the image and in its manipulation during the process of printing. A proof of this is his predilection for colour on behalf of neat black and white, a characteristic which completely reverses the tradition of documentary photography. The Grammar of Photography consists of a selection of 120 photos which trace an almost complete path of his work, from the middle eighties up to now. A true “grammar” of photography” through which, chapter by chapter, Ruff exercises himself in linguistic experimentations, thus trying to re-interpret the photographic code. The exhibition proposes a series of “stereo” images and of “retouched” portraits realized according to the technique used during the Nineteeenth century. A conceptual path starting from the first, innovative portraits – the close-ups of his fellow-students, later exploded into those great formats which have made him famous to the world; then the boundlessness of the starred skies and of the nights spied through the green metallic light of the cameras used by militaries, to end with the series realized in these last years, where the technological image break down, by expanding it, the traditional photographic frame in order to create unexpected links. Nonetheless, Ruff always looks at the basis of the photographical language, so that every new theoretic, more than technological, issue is drawn back to it. Thus can be explained the series “Substrats” or the moving works dedicated to the “Machines” used in printing offices, as well as the “Nudes” downloaded from the net and reprinted on film. As though it could be a sort of epochal resumé, starting from his experience but facing with the surrounding world, the latest series “Jpeg” – widely represented both in the exhibition and in the catalogue – encloses many elements which has been characterizing Ruff’s work. Besides the mysterious beauty of far archaeological sites or the languid romanticism of some landscapes, there stand out the images of Cecenia, the bursting volcanoes, the dramatic fragments of the 11th September. A new way, probably exasperated, to re-read the different typologies of the world without ever withdrawing from tradition nor from the typical approach of the great German photography, which nowadays is no doubt the greatest existent artistic expression. It is no surprise that, after the short inter-reign of Jeff Wall, the Dusseldorf Academy has assigned Thomas Ruff the chair which had belonged for decades to Bernd Becher.    

Thomas Ruff . The Grammar of Photography
curated by Filippo Maggia
Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa. Venice

from 16th June to 15th October 2006.

Thomas Ruff was born in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany in 1958. He lives and works in Dusseldorf. Ruff has been a student of Bernd Becher at Düsseldorf Kunstakademie from 1977 untill 1985.