Ruth Hommelsheim

Extending the boundaries

While her main medium is photography, Ruth Hommelsheim exceeds the boundaries of the medium reflecting on its conditions and thereby transgressing a purely documentary approach. Besides her longtime research on urbanity, another focal point of her work is the profound investigation of information extracted from archives. Hommelsheim converts the material by processing and recombining it into new contexts, creating new perspectives.

In addition to photography, she incorporates further media and techniques into her work. The partial painting over photographs with glazing layers of white acrylic paint is typical of Hommelsheims artistic approach. By removing the background in this way, persons or objects seem to have fallen out of time and space as a specific context is no longer assigned. By arranging the exhibition space and combined with elements such as drawing, video and installation, Hommelsheim creates new references and readings. Hommelsheim usually creates large series of works, which then condense to site-specific installations in an exhibition.

Ruth Hommelsheim studied photography in Darmstadt, Germany and now lives and works in Berlin. In 2007 she co-founded Loris Gallery, a collective and discursive platform for visual, societal, political and social implementations of artistic questions. Hommelsheim’s work has been exhibited throughout Germany, Europe and China.

What is it about your studio space that inspires you?

A space on my own with large windows and high ceiling in a quite neighborhood

What sounds, scents and sights do you encounter while in your studio?

Sometimes I can hear the buddhist monks singing

What is your favourite material to work with? How has your use of it evolved throughout your practice?

archival pigment prints painted over with white acrylic colour

What themes do you pursue?

Urbanity and ordering systems/archives

EXHIBITIONS

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GALLERIES

AWARDS

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