Thomas Ruff

‘No room for heroes or saints in these environments—and no room for villains or demons either. Here, where every details is in focus, unmasked, everything seems under control: we see all, we can register all, but we cannot go behind, or inside, to discover any substance beneath appearance.’

- Ida Panicelli on Thomas Ruff’s Houses, Artforum, Vol. 27, No. 7, 1989

Executed between 1987 and 1991, Thomas Ruff’s Häuser (Houses) is one of the artist’s earliest and most celebrated bodies of work. The series comprises photographs of banal, suburban buildings constructed in Germany during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970. The present work, Haus Nr. 6 I, is a prime example of the series, depicting a blank-faced, concrete structure squat beneath a monotonous sky. In the early days of digital retouching, Ruff deployed the technique to remove any people and objects that indicated human presence. This contributes to the impression of the detached, almost clinical objectivity that the work evokes. The bleakness of the apartment block is amplified by the photograph’s large scale. Ruff utilises both format and digital manipulation to force the viewer’s attention on a façade designed solely for its purpose, typical of a functional and conformist approach in post-war German architecture. In doing so, Ruff turns something created deliberately to be indifferent and unremarkable into monumental.

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