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Galerie R�diger Sch�ttle: Thomas Ruff | Thomas Helbig | Lorena Herrera Rashid - 5 Sept 2009 to 17 Oct 2009 Current Exhibition |
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Thomas Ruff, zycles 3075, 2009
Pigmentdruck auf Leinwand 256 x 206 cm, Edition 1/ 3 |
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Thomas Ruff September 5 � October 17, 2009 Thomas Helbig September 5 � October 17, 2009 Lorena Herrera Rashid Acapulco Golden � Installation on the Roof Terrace 2nd � 31st October 2009 Thomas Ruff September 5 � October 17, 2009 Opening reception: Friday,September 4, 7�9 pm Thomas Ruff will be exhibiting the latest works from his series �Cassini� and �Zycles� at the R�diger Sch�ttle Gallery from 5th September onwards. Born in the Black Forest town of Zell am Harmersbach in 1958 and a former student of Bernd and Hiller Becher, Thomas Ruff counts among the most significant artist photographers of the present day. His copious oeuvre is characterized by vastly differing themes. While in the beginning his photographic works typically consisted of large series of objective, neutral depictions, such as portraits, houses, interiors, stars in the nightsky, Thomas Ruff has, since the late 1990s, been increasingly concerning himself with the new possibilities afforded by digital photography, not least with the technical manipulability of images disseminated through the mass medium of the Internet. Motivated by his fascination with astronomy from a very early age, Ruff devotes himself again and again to the theme of the universe. His series �Sterne� from the early 1990s is based on archive material from the European Southern Observatory. The blown-up images draw the viewer into a seemingly motionless reality, while in actual reality the universe is in a constant state of motion and change. For his more recent series, �Cassini�, Thomas Ruff likewise selected material from an astronomical archive, this time from the NASA. The title of the series refers to Giovanni Domenico Cassini, who was the first astronomer to observe, in the 17th century, the 60 or so moons of the planet Saturn. He also gave his name to the space probe that sent back to Earth the photographs of Saturn and its moons in 1997, these photographs being the ones on which Thomas Ruff then based his seriesof the same name. The resulting images are distinguished by bright, strong colours and geometrical forms, their sheer aesthetic simplicity conveying a calmness and clarity that belie the technological complexity of their background. �Zycles� is Thomas Ruff�s most recent group of works. This series constitutes yet a further step towards deconstructing the process of photographic production and reproduction and, like the �Cassini� images, has a scientific background: the circulating coloured lines on the large-formats are based on mathematical calculations. Ruff drew his inspiration for these images from 19th century copperplate engravings depicting electromagnetic fields. Using mathematical figures, such as cycloids, and 3D computer software, the artist transforms the lines into three-dimensional curves and interweaves them into abstract formations, finally reducing them to two-dimensionality in the form a printed images. The coloured, dynamically curved, interweaving lines spread across the entire picture plane and create an infinite virtual picture space, the exploration of which becomes � through the absence of all possible points of reference � a playful and sensorily exciting experience. Besides the white-backgrounded �Zycles�, which as pigment prints on canvas almost seem to have the character of drawings, Thomas Ruff will also be showing at the R�diger Sch�ttle Gallery � and this will be their premi�re � his �Dark Zycles�, the black backgrounds of which will yet again awaken associations with outer space. Thomas Helbig September 5 � October 17, 2009 Opening reception: Friday,September 4, 7�9 pm The oeuvre of the artist Thomas Helbig comprises three genres of art: drawing, painting and sculpture. For his sculptures, Helbig destroys commonplace, mass-produced, naturalistic figures of the kind normally intended for decorative purposes and forces their fragments into completely new and strangely futurist forms and structures. Coated with paint and resin, the sculptures feature fragments that are still recognizable � such as heads, torsi, hands, snouts and trunks � and hence not only enable the viewer to guess the identity of the original objects but also provide a broad scope for all kinds of mental associations. Their organic forms remind us of the permanent processes of decay and renewal that all forms of life undergo. In his paintings, too, Thomas Helbig will occasionally appropriate existing paintings of indeterminate origin and transform them, through overpainting and perhaps also through the addition of other materials, into completely new, expressive and, at times, relief-like works. In an interview held in 2006, Thomas Helbig explained the concept behind his works: �They are about reduction to an unrecognizable state from which something new can then evolve. Concealing in order to reveal something, encrypting in order to make something visible. That is the purpose of the overpainting, for it makes the different materials and their colours recede for the sake of an organic whole. Destruction � the liberation from the constraints of naturalism, so to speak � is a prerequisite in my work for the development of that special something that one might call poetry.� Much the same may said of Thomas Helbig�s drawings, too: they are like windows that open out onto an ethereal cosmos filled with traces and vestiges of abstract, modernistic forms that unfold their own unique form of poetry before the viewer�s gaze. Born in Rosenheim in 1967, Thomas Helbig today lives and works in Berlin. After having taken part in numerous international exhibitions, he was first honoured with a solo exhibition in a public institution � Oldenburger Kunstverein � in 2008. Lorena Herrera Rashid Acapulco Golden � Installation on the Roof Terrace 2nd � 31st October 2009 Opening: Thursday, 1st October 2009, 7�9 pm A brightly shining, two metres high golden plant with longish leaves rotates in the roof garden of the R�diger Sch�ttle Gallery. The autumnal sunlight reflects on its metallic surfaces and occasionally dazzles the viewer. �Acapulco Golden� is the title the artist Lorena Herrera Rashid has given her installation, a reference to the city of Acapulco in her native Mexico. The title sounds exotic, not least because the city it refers to is a glamorous resort on the Pacific coast, where famous Hollywood stars once held wild parties and where, today, �Clavadistas� dive from La Quebrada�s perilous cliffs into the waves far below before the eyes of the international jet set. But �Acapulco Gold� is also the name of a cannabis plant from the region around Acapulco, and the botanists among our visitors will have long since recognized the metallic plant in the roof garden as such a plant. Thus it is that this work, brightly gleaming in the autumnal sunlight, also has its dark side: associations with gangster criminality and rich, unscrupulous drug barons are awakened, for Acapulco too is one of the theatres in the Mexican drug war. And so Lorena Herrera Rashid�s installation, beautifully worked in brass, permits two mutually contradicting interpretations: the plant as a luxurious icon of the hippy movement and the plant as an admonition of the serious political and social shortcomings in Mexico. The discrepancy between form and content, between the outward aesthetic appeal and the inward social criticism, could not be more striking. The viewer finds himself in a quandary: he wishes to marvel at something beautiful but sees nothing marvellous in the negative associations the work invokes � on the contrary. All that glitters is not gold. Lorena Herrera Rashid, born in Mexico City in 1972, lives and works in Munich. She is studying sculpture under Professor Olaf Metzel at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. |
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