"Dark Matter. Thomas Ruff, James Welling"

About

"Dark Matter: Thomas Ruff, James Welling" brings together two artists who show us that the photographic image is not necessarily what it claims to be. Thomas Ruff (*1958) and James Welling (*1951) are interested in photographic images that go well beyond their mere representational function.  

With their conceptual approach to photography, both artists explore the conditions of sight, its ties to the photographic apparatus and how photographic images condition our perception of the world.

While Thomas Ruff, who studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf under Hilla and Bernd Becher, takes a matter of fact, objectifying, and analytic approach, James Welling, a student of John Baldessari at CalArts, Los Angeles, developed an artistic practice in a so-called “Post Studio” environment with conceptual and institutionally critical approaches. Only after graduating did he autodidactically pick up a camera and developed a diverse, hybrid photographic practice that also integrates elements of painting and storytelling.  

Ruff and Welling are both members of the same generation that grew out of the emerging discourse in the 1970s around mediated culture and the ensuing “Appropriation Art.” The latter refers to artistic appropriation of pre-existing, mostly photographic images which, disseminated and circulated in the media, influenced “mass society” like never before.

Thomas Welling and James Ruff combine the medium of photography with a scientific-analytic approach that knows no technical or aesthetic boundaries and is marked by experimentation and a radical stylistic diversity: They work in analog and digital, color and black and white, with and without a camera. A photographic image that exceeds its representational function could not lie further from clearly constructed architecture and yet, or precisely for this reason, Ruff and Welling deal again and again with the constructed reality around them.

In the light of the upcoming renovation and expansion of Kunsthalle Bielefeld, a focal point of the show is on the artistic examination of anonymous and iconic architecture (including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in both artists’ work and Philip Johnson in Welling’s).

The exhibition draws attention to a series of thematic juxtapositions between the two artists. This concerns abstraction and autonomy in the photographic image, the search for a “visual nothingness” (Ruff) or “the image that you do not understand and do not remember, but that still lies sharp and clear before you” (Welling). Traces of subjective and social memory can be found in these often distanced and seemingly objective images. Likewise, questions about our relationship to photographic images in the digital age remain potent.