Colecciones de arte

Li, 1995

DESCRIPTION

These two photographs belong to the series l.m.v.d.r, begun in 1999 when Julian Heynen commissioned Ruff to photograph the houses designed by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1927 to 1930 for an exhibition at the Kunstmuseen in Krefeld. The exhibition commemorated the reopening of the architect's two houses built in Krefeld, the Haus Lange and the Haus Esters, as exhibition spaces. Ruff also included the Haus Tugendhat and the Barcelona Pavillion in this series.

His work method was based on the study of van der Rohe's architecture itself, of which he was a great admirer, as well as on the existing photographs of the buildings. He therefore decided to establish a view of the buildings as a whole by photographing interiors (living rooms, bathrooms, stairways) and exteriors, thereby creating separate series exploring each of the edifices portrayed. We can surmise the meaning of said sequences -which are quite closely related to the characteristically catalogue-like nature of his work- from the title, a sort of computer search code based on the initials of the buildings and the number corresponding to the digital imaging (h.e.k for Haus Esters Krefeld).

As a result of the Krefeld exhibition, Terence Riley, who was preparing a retrospective exhibition on the architect for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, commissioned him to photograph the buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe up to 1938.

The series l.m.v.d.r was expanded upon not due to this new commission alone, but because Ruff employed the already existing photographs of van der Rohe buildings to bestow them with other post production effects and formats. Hence, at the German Pavilion in Barcelona there was an installation presented in the stereoscopic format Ruff had previously utilized in the series Stereofotos (1994), some houses took on the newspaper aesthetic of the series Zeitungsfotos (1990-1991), and he used colour filters -as many as eight in w.h.s- or corrective filters, with which he achieved a blurred view similar to the one in Nudes (1999), as occurred in d.p.b. 08, which has its mirror in the sharp d.p.b. 01. C. D.