Thomas Ruff: Sterne (Stars)

Ruff has been fascinated by astronomy since his childhood. During the early part of his photographic career, he was often frustrated by his inability to create his own images of the night sky, being without access to powerful telescopes and other specialized equipment. In 1989, he purchased a collection of negatives from the European Southern Observatory (an international research centre in Chile) taken with a special telescopic lens as part of a comprehensive effort to document the visible universe. Ruff arbitrarily selected certain star formations and proceeded to reorient their perspective and significantly enlarge them, a process which invariably added visual noise to the images. Rather than following a scientific methodology, the resulting compositions are based entirely on Ruff’s own visual criteria and no longer have a counterpart in reality. As such, they reflect the artist’s ongoing questioning of the notion of photographic veracity, while also contrasting an ancient quest for finding meaning in the sky with the ideal of pictorial abstraction.