Rut Blees Luxemburg works with photography to investigate the significance of the modern project on the city. Her large-scale photographic works expand the concept of the ‘commonsensual’ in relation to urban public space and representation.
Rut Blees Luxemburg’s work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at the Rencontres d'Arles, Photomonth Krakow and Digital Arts Centre, Taipei. She is a frequent speaker at photography conferences and other public platforms that debate contemporary art and its wider context.
Rut Blees Luxemburg’s work shows the public spaces of the city, where the ambitions and unexpected sensual elaborations of the ‘modern project’ are revealed and contested. In her photographic work she brings to light the overlooked, the dismissed and the unforeseen and creates immersive and vertiginous compositions that challenge prevailing representations of the city. Her projects are located in the urban complex and series include Liebeslied/My Suicides (London), Phantom (Dakar) and Black Sunrise (New York).
Rut Blees Luxemburg’s photographs have been exhibited internationally, most recently at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Royal Academy, London; and LABoral, Gijón, Spain. Tate Modern, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Centre Pompidou among other public collections have acquired Blees Luxemburg’s work.
Rut Blees Luxemburg monograph Commonsensual was published by Black Dog Publishing, London, and is a comprehensive survey of her work, including among her collaborative works the opera Liebeslied/My Suicides (with the philosopher Alexander García Düttmann and the composer Paul Clark) and her iconic public art installations Caliban Towers and Piccadilly’s Peccadilloes. Her collaborative forays into music and urban culture have led to celebrated album covers such as The Streets’ Original Pirate Material.