Ralf Peters

In an era in which digitally designed virtual worlds of cinema, video games and advertising are commonplace and often appear more real than reality itself, the German artist Ralf Peters plays intelligently with our expectations of the photographic medium.

Born in 1960 in Lüneburg, Ralf Peters works with a wide range of subjects, motifs and techniques. All of his works are based on observations drawn from everyday life. Like a classical photographer, Peters finds his images through close observation of his surroundings. Yet the motif is only the first step toward an image that is less a statement about reality than a reflection on photography and its relationship to the visible world.

The photographed image thus becomes a construction—its appearance not primarily rooted in reality, but in a calculated aestheticisation of it. A photograph by Ralf Peters does not appear “real” because it documents an observed scene. Instead, his images approach a sense of authenticity that derives less from lived experience and more from the digitally altered realities we encounter repeatedly. His conceptual photographs continually confront the viewer with the question of whether the artist is faithfully reproducing a scene or presenting an elaborately staged digital manipulation. At times, a soberly captured photograph can appear stranger than an overtly manipulated one.

The tension in Peters’ work—often developed in series—emerges precisely from this paradox. In the series Night / Colors, individual trees are dramatically lit against nocturnal darkness, transforming them into sculptural forms. In Candies, the shapes of photographed objects dissolve through defocus, resulting in candy-coloured, nearly abstract compositions. In Skylines, the extreme vertical format pushes the titular motif to the lower edge of the image, rendering it almost marginal within a composition dominated by a neutral sky.

The six-part work Indoor and the photograph Prince present nearly abstract structures that can be understood as photographic investigations of the relationship between space and surface. Some individual works—such as Pool or Schwarz-Weiß—suggest that the photographer may have deliberately arranged the found scenery.

Ralf Peters studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. His works have been shown internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently in Out of Focus. After Gerhard Richter at the Hamburg Kunsthalle. His works are held in major public and private collections, including the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Deutsche Bank Collection, and UBS collections in Zurich and Milan.