THOMAS RUFF (B. 1958), 17h 58m / -25°, 1990

THOMAS RUFF (B. 1958)
17h 58m / -25°, 1990
chromogenic print, face-mounted to acrylic
signed, titled, dated and numbered '1/2' in pencil (frame backing board)
image: 79 1/8 x 53 1/8 in. (201 x 135 cm.)
sheet/ face mount: 98 x 69 5/8 in. (249 x 177 cm.)
This work is number one from an edition of two.

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Pre-Lot Text
‘…I am convinced that it is not enough to make a portrait of just one person if you want to get an idea of the human being. In order to have as comprehensive a picture as possible, you have to make portraits of as many people as possible. The same applies to houses, heavenly bodies, newspaper photos, night shots and so on, right down to sexual fantasies. A single picture is too little, that is why I work in series.’ Thomas Ruff
One of the giants of contemporary photography, Thomas Ruff studied under Berndt and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakadamie Düsseldorf in the 1980s, alongside others including Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth. The Bechers’ impersonal, objective approach, whereby they would document types of industrial structure in grids of monochrome photographs shot from the same elevated angle, was hugely influential. Ruff’s work, too, is organised according to methodical series or ‘typologies’, but his practice is far wider in scope, posing restrained, powerfully intelligent investigations into what photography means across genres including still life, portraiture, landscape, reportage and abstraction. Perhaps his most renowned images are his passport-style portrait photographs of his friends and colleagues. Works like Portrait (E. Zapp), 1990, astonish with their crisp focus and monumental scale. The photographs reveal every minute exterior detail of their subjects, yet the sitters’ blank expressions refuse to disclose anything beyond the surface. His own Self-Portrait of 1987, haunted by the spectre of Albrecht Dürer, is just as inscrutable, arms crossed and glasses removed as if to foreground the clarity of his own piercing gaze. Throughout his practice, Ruff troubles photography’s status as a tool of revelation, creating works that are as impenetrable as they are beautiful.
Ruff’s fascination with astronomy – an obsession that began in boyhood – gives rise to another important strand of his practice. 17h 58m / -25˚, 1990, stems from the artist’s Sterne (Star) series created between 1989 and 1992. Based on negatives of photographic plates taken by the Schmidt telescope at the European Southern Observatory during the 1970s and 1980s, each work is named after the reference used to indicate the instrument’s various divisions of the southern hemisphere. Infused with the immersive, all-over power of Colour Field painting, the work invites us to confront the night sky face-on, inducing a profound awareness of our insignificance within the cosmos. Despite their metaphysical and scientific resonance, however, Ruff’s typologies are fundamentally oblique: the systems of order underpinning the abstract chaos of the universe remain beyond our grasp. In later works such as m.a.r.s.23, 2011, Ruff extends his explorations of the solar system, shifting his focus from the vast distances of galactic space to planetary close-ups transmitted from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Digitally enhanced and tilted from aerial to vertical orientation, they capture geographic features that are both alien and strangely reminiscent of our own. As Iwona Blazwick writes, ‘we attempt to navigate these landscapes, to make sense of a topography that looks familiar but that we can’t place. This is a terrain that resists our identification or possession’ (I. Blazwick, ‘The Cosmos as Found Image’, in Thomas Ruff, exh. cat., Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2017, p. 201). Much like his portraits, these are works that hint at discovery and exposure, yet ultimately hold our curiosity at bay.