Thomas Ruff - Gagosian Gallery

Thomas Ruff, nudes dr02, 2011

Astronomy and pornography are the twin preoccupations which, via the internet, supply the material for Thomas Ruff's two exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery: MA.R.S is at the Britannia Street gallery and Nudes is at Davies Street (both until 21 April). 

Ruff is a graduate of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, famous for the influential teaching of Bernd and Hilla Becher on a generation of photographers which includes Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer as well as Ruff.

For the MA.R.S series Ruff has injected colour into black and white images of Mars, taken from the NASA web site; for Nudes he has taken images from internet pornography, enlarged them to monumental scale producing blurred and painterly images. 

Read Geoff Dyer's essay: Porn and the shadow side of paradise: ThomasRuff's Nudes. See also 2003 article in Tate Magazine and video of Ruff talking about his work in 2010.

Thomas Ruff, ma.r.s. 04_III, 2012

Thomas Ruff, ma.r.s. 01_III, 2012

Thomas Ruff, nudes ro04 (detail), 2011

Miroslav Tichý, 1926 - 2011

If you want to be famous, you have to be worse at something than everyone else in the world. (Miroslav Tichý, quoted in Dyer, G. (2010) Working the Room, Edinburgh: Canongate, p74)

One of Miroslav Tichý's cameras

 Miroslav Tichý died on 12th April at the age of 84. He was a 'primitivist' photographer who lived the life of a derelict and made his own cameras from scavenged junk. His voyeuristic pictures of women, taken in his home town in the Czech Republic were off-kilter, either over or under exposed, stained, bleached, scratched and... wonderful. See some examples, below.

I only 'discovered' Tichý last year, and almost all I know about him is gleaned from a wonderful essay by Geoff Dyer (Dyer, Geoff (2010) "Miroslav Tichy" in Working the Room: Essays and Reviews, 1999-2010, Edinburgh: Canongate, pp72-79). As Dyer records, Tichý only came to public attention in 2004 when Roman Buxbaum, who had begun collecting his work, wrote an article which led to an exhibition in Seville; in 2008 Tichý was given a show at the Pompidou Centre, Paris.

 See also Roman Buxbaum on Miroslav Tichý, Miroslav Tichý: Tarzan Retired, by Roman Buxbaum, and Blog essay by Mark Power.