Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff

Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle once again presents works from recent series by Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth. They studied together under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the early 1980s and have kept exploring to this day our cultural and living environments with archival meticulousness.
Over the past year, Candida Höfer created more than twenty works on the newly opened Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. As is usual for Höfer, she photographed the interiors in the central perspective, but she also took pictures of exteriors and details such as windows and terraces as well as of models by the architects Herzog & de Meuron. Moreover, Höfer focuses also on the seemingly trivial peripheral matters of these cultural sites, surprising viewers with small-format close-ups and contrasting the accurately arranged main venues.
In his new series, Press ++, Thomas Ruff presents enormously magnified press images he acquired from various media archives. Whereas in the 1990s he approached the analog press image by presenting cropped and magnified newspaper photos, displaying their black grain and canceling their relationship to the accompanying text, in his new series Ruff now merges the original image with the editors’ caption, juxtaposing them as equal parts. Image, writing, choice of detail, and retouch are combined to an informative whole: recto and verso constitute a common aesthetic value.

Thomas Struth has been continually developing his technology cycle since 2007, in which he seeks out spaces for scientists and researchers that are usually closed to the public and confronts us with a world of tomorrow. The title of one of these works, AGLAE C2RMF, Paris 2013, may seem cryptic at first. It depicts an antique bronze sculpture that is  controlled by a complexly wired device. Art history and modern technology converge in this piece: The scenery of the Louvre’s restoration workshop mirrors the technological progress that forces even the creative aspect of art to constantly prove itself anew.