Outer space appears in Thomas Ruff’s work not as a romantic distance, but as a technically produced image.

The catalogue Stellar Landscapes focuses on four series in which Ruff works with astronomical and scientific image material: Sterne, zycles, cassini, and ma.r.s. The central question is not simply how the cosmos, planets, energy, or space can be represented, but how such images are produced, circulated, and perceived.

In the Sterne series, made between 1989 and 1992, Ruff already moved away from taking photographs himself. He used images from the European Southern Observatory, selecting, enlarging, and reframing them. Here, the photographic intervention lies mainly in the choice of detail, scale, and presentation. Scientific images are transformed into large-format pictorial spaces that appear almost abstract.

In later series, Ruff’s intervention becomes more visible. zycles is based on historical diagrams of electromagnetic fields, which he translated into complex linear structures through digital processes. For cassini, he used image material from NASA’s mission to Saturn; for ma.r.s., he worked with photographs of the surface of Mars from NASA space research. Ruff digitally reworked these images, altering cropping, perspective, contrast, and colour, and thereby removing them from a purely scientific context.

Factual, often black-and-white research images become visually intensified pictorial worlds situated between document, abstraction, and projection. The catalogue presents Ruff as an artist who does not define photography by the camera alone, but as a practice of working with existing images: their technical conditions, their legibility, and their capacity to shape our image of reality.