Konrad Fischer Galerie is pleased to show for the first time in Düsseldorf the large-format photographs of Thomas Ruff's new series tableaux russes in the context of his already well-known series tableaux chinois.
Thomas Ruff has been interested in the genre of propaganda photography for many years. The thematic exploration of these photographs began about twenty years ago, when the artist acquired illustrated books about Mao Zedong and a collection of various photographic magazines, including La Chine, the French edition of a Chinese Communist Party magazine, produced especially for distribution abroad and distributed first as China Reconstructs from 1949, then from 1963 both in Western countries (France, Great Britain, Spain, Germany) and in Turkey, Egypt and South America. They mainly depicted political actors and the achievements of the Cultural Revolution as idealised images of Chinese life: the everyday world of work, military exercises, parades, sporting events and opera and ballet performances.
For the tableaux russes, Thomas Ruff also draws on photographs published since the 1930s in Soviet propaganda magazines such as URSS en construction. Renowned artists such as Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Varvara Stepanova and the photo journalist Max Alpert worked for the magazine USSR in Construction, which was published in several languages from 1931 and whose first issue was taken over by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky himself. After Constructivism was massively denounced as a bourgeois art form by the Stalin nomenklatura, the publishing house ceased publication. The subsequent magazine Soviet Union appeared from 1950.
With his current works, Thomas Ruff once again explores the gap between representation and reality. The historical, partly staged, partly heavily processed analogue original forms the source material, which the artist further processes digitally and allows to collide with the pixel grids of the 21st century.
