Thomas Ruff: New Work

Opening on Thursday, May 22, the gallery will present new work by German artist Thomas Ruff. This will be the artist's third solo exhibition at the gallery. A large retrospective of Ruff's work has been touring major museums in Europe since February 2002. It is currently on view at Tate Liverpool through July 6, 2003. Ruff's recent nudes series is the subject of a monograph published this month by Abrams, with text by Michel Houellebecq.

Best known for his oversized, deadpan portraits, his unmediated shots of commonplace interiors, and his seemingly straightforward photographs of architecture, Ruff has quietly approached many familiar genres, and proceeded to discreetly reinvent them. Ruff has an uncanny feel for the look of the ordinary–in people, places, and objects. However, his brand of photographic objectivity is not that purportedly practiced by photojournalists. Rather, it is elicited by scanning the mundane for the telling particulars of aggregated detail, and by a reserved and skeptical curiosity towards photography's ultimate truthfulness.

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