Thomas Ruff (born 10 February 1958) is a German photographer who lives and works in

Düsseldorf Düsseldorf ( , , ; often in English sources; Low Franconian and Ripuarian: ''Düsseldörp'' ; archaic nl, Dusseldorp ) is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second-largest city in th ...

, Germany. He has been described as "a master of edited and reimagined images". Ruff shares a studio on Düsseldorf's Hansaallee, with fellow German photographers

Laurenz Berges Laurenz Berges (born Cloppenburg, 1966) is a German photographer. He graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as Master Student under Bernd Becher in 1996. Berges' work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the ...

Andreas Gursky Andreas Gursky (born 15 January 1955) is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. He is known for his large format architecture and landscape colour photographs, often using a high point of view. His works ...

and

Axel Hütte Axel Hütte (born 1951) is a German photographer. He is considered one of main representatives of the Düsseldorf School of Photography. Biography Hütte was born in the German city of Essen in 1951. He studied photography in Düsseldorf Art A ...

. The studio, a former municipal electricity station, includes a basement gallery.

Early life and education

Thomas Ruff, one of six children, was born in 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach in the Black Forest, Germany. In the summer of 1974, Ruff acquired his first camera and after attending an evening class in the basic techniques of photography he started to experiment, taking shots similar to those he had seen in many amateur photography magazines. During his studies in Düsseldorf and inspired by the lectures of Benjamin HD Buchloh, Ruff developed his method of conceptual serial photography. Ruff began photographing landscapes, but while he was still a student he transitioned to the interiors of German living quarters, with typical features of the 1950s to 1970s. This was followed by similar views of buildings and portraits of friends and acquaintances from the Düsseldorf art and music scene, initially in small formats. Ruff studied photography from 1977 to 1985 with

Bernd and Hilla Becher Bernhard "Bernd" Becher (; 20 August 1931 – 22 June 2007), and Hilla Becher, née Wobeser (2 September 1934 – 10 October 2015), were German conceptual artists and photographers working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their e ...

at the

Kunstakademie Düsseldorf The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf is the academy of fine arts of the state of North Rhine Westphalia at the city of Düsseldorf, Germany. Notable artists who studied or taught at the academy include Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Magdalena Jetelová ...

(Düsseldorf Art Academy), where fellow students included the photographers

Candida Höfer Candida Höfer (born 4 February 1944) is a German photographer. She is a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like other Becher students, Höfer's work is known for technical perfection and a strictly conceptual approach. From 1997 to 2000, ...

Thomas Struth Thomas Struth (born 11 October 1954) is a German photographer who is best known for his ''Museum Photographs'' series, family portraits and black and white photographs of the streets of Düsseldorf and New York taken in the 1970s. Struth lives ...

, Angelika Wengler, and Petra Wunderlich. In 1982, he spent six months at the

Cité internationale des arts The Cité internationale des arts is an artist-in-residence building complex which accommodates artists of all specialities and nationalities in Paris. It comprises two sites, one located in the Marais and the other in Montmartre. Approximatel ...

in Paris. In 1993, he was a scholar at

Villa Massimo Villa Massimo, short for Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo ( it, Accademia Tedesca Roma Villa Massimo), is a German cultural institution in Rome, established in 1910 and located in the Villa Massimo. The fellowship of the German Academy in Rom ...

in Rome.

Work

Commenting on his influences, Ruff said, "My teacher Bernd Becher, showed us photographs by Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, and the new American colour photographers." He is often compared with other members of a prominent generation of European photographers that includes

, Andreas Gursky, and

Rineke Dijkstra Rineke Dijkstra HonFRPS (born 2 June 1959) is a Dutch photographer. She lives and works in Amsterdam."Thomas Ruff" at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, February 17 – May 20, 2012

Gagosian Gallery Gagosian is a contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. The gallery exhibits some of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are 16 gallery spaces: five in New York City; three in London; two in P ...

. The resulting ''Portraits'' depict the individual persons – often Ruff's fellow students – framed as in a passport photo, typically shown with emotionless expressions, sometimes face-on, sometimes in profile, and in front of a plain background. Ruff began to experiment with large-format printing in 1986, ultimately producing photographs up to seven by five feet in size (210 × 165 cm). By 1987 Ruff had distilled the project in several ways, settling on an almost exclusive use of the full frontal view and enlarging the finished work to monumental proportions. Art critic Charles Hagen, writing for ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', commented: "Blown up to wall-size proportions, the photographs looked like gigantic banners of Eastern European dictators."Charles Hagen (23 February 1996)
When Bland Plus Bland Equals More Than Bland
''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

''. Because he found the effect of the colors too dominant in these, Ruff chose a light and neutral background for the portraits he made between 1986 and 1991. In a discussion with

Philip Pocock Philip Francis Pocock (2 July 1906 – 6 September 1984) was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Toronto from 1971 to 1978. Early years Pocock was born in St. Thomas, Ontario, on 2 July 1906. After studying theology at St. Peter's Sem ...

, Ruff mentions a connection between his portraits and the police observation methods in Germany in the 1970s during the

German Autumn The German Autumn (german: Deutscher Herbst) was a series of events in Germany in 1977, mostly late in the year, associated with the kidnapping and murder of industrialist, businessman, and former SS member Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of t ...

. Indeed, while experimenting with composite faces in 1992, Ruff came across the

Minolta was a Japanese manufacturer of cameras, camera accessories, photocopiers, fax machines, and laser printers. Minolta Co., Ltd., which is also known simply as Minolta, was founded in Osaka, Japan, in 1928 as . It made the first integrated autofocu ...

Montage Unit, a picture generating machine, used by the German police in the 1970s to generate composite portraits. Through a combination of mirrors, four portraits, fed into the machine, produce one composite picture. Ruff started out reconstructing faces but soon found it more interesting to construct artificial faces, which often combine features of men and women, that do not, but could conceivably, exist in reality; this resulted in his ''Anderes Porträt'' series (1994–1995). Ruff intended that large groups of the approximately eight-by-ten-inch color portraits would be hung together, so to add variety he photographed each person against a colored backdrop.

''Häuser''

The series ''Häuser'' was created between 1987 and 1991. Ruff's building portraits are likewise serial, and have been edited digitally to remove obstructing details – a typifying method, which gives the images an exemplary character. Of these Ruff notes, "This type of building represents more or less the ideology and economy in the West German republic in the past thirty years." Architects

Herzog & de Meuron Herzog & de Meuron Basel Ltd.,
" Herzog & de Meuron. Retrieved on 11 October 2012. "Herzog & de Meuron Basel Ltd. R ...

soon became aware of this form of architecture photography and invited Ruff to participate in their entry for the

Venice Biennale of Architecture Venice Biennale of Architecture (in Italian Mostra di Architettura di Venezia) is an international exhibition of architecture from nations around the world, held in Venice, Italy, every other year. It was held on even years until 2018, but 202 ...

in 1991 with a photograph of their building for

Ricola Ricola Ltd./Ricola AG is a Swiss manufacturer of cough drops and breath mints. The head office of Ricola is located in Laufen, Basel-Country. Business Ricola listed sales of 307.2 million Swiss francs in 2016 and employs 400 workers. Aroun ...

. In 1999 Ruff made a series of digitally altered photographs of

modernist architecture Modern architecture, or modernist architecture, was an architectural movement or architectural style based upon new and innovative technologies of construction, particularly the use of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete; the idea that form ...

Mies van der Rohe Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd ...

. The series ''l.m.v.d.r.'' – the initials of the architect – began as a commission offered to Ruff in 1999–2000 in connection with the renovation of

Haus Lange and Haus Esters Haus Lange and Haus Esters are two residential houses designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Krefeld, Germany, for German industrialists Hermann Lange and Josef Esters. They were built between 1928 and 1930 in the Bauhaus style. The houses have ...

in Krefeld, Germany. Having worked with architectural subject matter since the mid-1980s, Ruff was enlisted to photograph the Krefeld buildings as well as the Barcelona Pavilion and the

Villa Tugendhat Villa Tugendhat is an architecturally significant building in Brno, Czech Republic. It is one of the pioneering prototypes of modern architecture in Europe, and was designed by the German architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. It w ...

in Brno.

''Sterne'', ''Nacht'' and ''Zeitungsfotos''

These first series were followed in 1989 by images of the night sky, ''Sterne'', which were not based on photographs by Ruff, but rather on archived images ('Catalogue of the Southern Sky', including 600 negatives) he had acquired of the European Southern Observatory in the Andes in Chile. These photographs of the stars, taken with a specially designed telescopic lens, are described and catalogued with the precise time of day and exact geographic position. From these photographs, Ruff selected specific details which he enlarged to a uniform grand scale. From 1992 to 1995, during the first Gulf War, Ruff produced his ''Nacht'' series (1992–1996), night images of exteriors and buildings using the same night vision infrared technology developed for use, both military and in broadcast television, during the Gulf War. From 1994 to 1996, these were followed by

Stereoscopy Stereoscopy (also called stereoscopics, or stereo imaging) is a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision. The word ''stereoscopy'' derives . Any stereoscopic image is ...

images, and another series in the 1990s, ''Zeitungsfotos,'' consisted of newspaper clippings enlarged without their original subtitles.

''Nudes''

In 2003, Ruff published a photographic collection of "Nudes" with a text by the French author

Michel Houellebecq Michel Houellebecq (; born Michel Thomas, 26 February 1956 or 1958) is a French author, known for his novels, poems and essays, as well as an occasional actor, filmmaker and singer. His first book was a biographical essay on the horror writer ...

. Ruff's images here are based on Internet pornography, which was digitally processed and obscured without any camera or traditional photographic device. In 2009,

Aperture Foundation Aperture Foundation is a nonprofit arts institution, founded in 1952 by Ansel Adams, Minor White, Barbara Morgan, Dorothea Lange, Nancy Newhall, Beaumont Newhall, Ernest Louie, Melton Ferris, and Dody Warren. Their vision was to create a forum ...

published ''JPEGs'', a large-scale book dedicated exclusively to his monumental series of pixilated enlargements of internet-culled images in the compressed

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

format. His ''Substrat'' series (2002–2003), based on images from Japanese manga and anime cartoons, continued this exploration of digitally altered Web-based pictures. However, he alters and manipulates the source material such that the work becomes an abstraction of forms and colors with no visual memory of the original source material. On 7 February 2011, one of his ''Nudes'' pictures appeared on the cover of ''

New York Magazine ''New York'' is an American biweekly magazine concerned with life, culture, politics, and style generally, and with a particular emphasis on New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to ''The New Yorker' ...

.''

''Zycles'', ''Cassini'', and ''ma.r.s.''

The artist's series ''Zycles'' and ''Cassini'' draw from scientific sources. ''Zycles'' are based on 3D renderings of mathematical curves that were inspired by Ruff's encounter with copperplate engravings found in 19th-century books on electromagnetism.Chang, Helen (7 August 2009).
Planet to Pixel: Ruff Abstractions of the Universe
(preview only; subscription required). ''

Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

''. wsj.com. Retrieved 7 April 2018. Ruff translated these images via a 3D computer-modeling program, but instead of his usual flattening, gives volume to 2D. The results are large, inkjet prints on canvas of colored lines and swirls. The ''Cassini'' works are based on photographic captures of saturn taken by NASA. Ruff has transformed the raw black and white prints with interjections of saturated colour. In the ''ma.r.s.'' series, also sourced from the NASA website, Ruff has transformed the raw black and white fragmentary representations of the planet Mars with interjections of saturated color. He also digitally changed the perspective.Thomas Ruff: photograms and ma.r.s., March 28 – April 27, 2013

David Zwirner Gallery David Zwirner Gallery is an American contemporary art gallery owned by David Zwirner. It has four gallery spaces in New York City and one each in London, Hong Kong, and Paris. History The Zwirner Gallery opened in 1993 on the ground floor of ...

, New York. In addition to the large C-prints, he has experimented for the first time with 3D image-making.

''Photograms''

With ''Photograms,'' Ruff engages with the

photogram A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The usual result is a negative shadow image th ...

, the cameraless technique advanced by

Man Ray Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky; August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealism, Surrealist movements, although his t ...

László Moholy-Nagy László Moholy-Nagy (; ; born László Weisz; July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the i ...

, and others in the early twentieth century. The photograms series depict abstract shapes, lines, and spirals in seemingly random formations with varying degrees of transparency and illumination. Both the objects and the light in Ruff's ''Photograms'' derive from a virtual darkroom built by a custom-made software program.

''press++''

Exhibited for the first time at

Sprüth Magers Sprüth Magers is a commercial art gallery owned by Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, with spaces in London, Berlin, Los Angeles and offices in Cologne, Hong Kong, New York and Seoul. The gallery represents over sixty artists and estates, inclu ...

's Berlin gallery in 2017, the ''press++'' series is based on images that have been published in American newspapers and magazines from the 1920s to 1970s and that Ruff found on

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...

. To produce these works, Ruff scans the front and back of each photograph and combines them digitally, taking into account the original image as well as crops, touch-ups, date stamps, scribbles and smudges.Thomas Ruff: New Works, 7 July – 26 August 2017, Sprüth Magers, Berlin. After a number of collaborations with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, the firm designed a studio building for Ruff and Gursky in Düsseldorf.

Publications

*''1979 to the Present.''

Distributed Art Publishers D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. is an American company that distributes and publishes books on art, photography, design, and visual culture.Hatje Cantz Hatje Cantz Verlag (English: Hatje Cantz Publishing) is a German book publisher specialising in photography, art, architecture and design. It was established in 1945 by Gerd Hatje Skira The festival of the Skira ( grc, Σκίρα) or Skirophoria ( grc, Σκιροφόρια) in the calendar of ancient Athens, closely associated with the Thesmophoria, marked the dissolution of the old year in May/June. Description At Athens, t ...

, 2009. . A retrospective. *''JPEGs.'' New York:

Aperture In optics, an aperture is a hole or an opening through which light travels. More specifically, the aperture and focal length of an optical system determine the cone angle of a bundle of rays that come to a focus in the image plane. An opt ...

, 2009. . With an essay by Bennet Simpson. *''Surfaces, Depths.'' Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2009. Edited by Gerald Matt. . With texts by Catherine Hug, Douglas Fogle, Kurt W. Forster, and Gerald Matt, and an interview by Matt with Ruff. *''Schwarzwald Landschaft.'' Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2010. . Text by Jochen Ludwig and Christiane Grathwohl-Scheffel. *''Stellar Landscapes.'' Heidelberg, Germany: Kehrer, 2012. . *''Works 1979–2011.'' Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2012. . With texts by

Okwui Enwezor Okwui Enwezor (23 October 1963 – 15 March 2019) was a Nigerian curator, art critic, writer, poet, and educator, specializing in art history. He lived in New York City and Munich. In 2014, he was ranked 24 in the ''ArtReview'' list of the 100 m ...

, Thomas Weski, and Valeria Liebermann. Exhibition catalogue. *''Sterne.'' London: Morel Books, 2013. . Edition of 1000 copies. *''Series.'' La Fábrica, 2014. . Text by José Manuel Costa and an interview by Valeria Liebermann with Ruff. *''Photograms and Negatives.'' New York: Rizzoli International, 2015. . Exhibition catalogue. *''Editions 1988–2014.'' Hatje Cantz, 2015. Edited by Jörg Schellmann. . With an introduction by Thomas Weski.

Film about Ruff

* – 50-minute documentary by Ralph Goertz. In German with English subtitles.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

* 2003:

Tate Liverpool Tate Liverpool is an art gallery and museum in Liverpool, Merseyside, England, and part of Tate, along with Tate St Ives, Cornwall, Tate Britain, London, and Tate Modern, London. The museum was an initiative of the Merseyside Development C ...

, Great Britain * 2016:

Art Gallery of Ontario The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO; french: Musée des beaux-arts de l'Ontario) is an art museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The museum is located in the Grange Park neighbourhood of downtown Toronto, on Dundas Street West between McCaul and Bev ...

, Toronto, Canada * 2016: National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan * 2017–2018:

Whitechapel Gallery The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery in Whitechapel on the north side of Whitechapel High Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The original building, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, opened in 1901 as one of the fir ...

, London. A solo retrospective exhibition. * 2017–2018: National Portrait Gallery, London. Selected works from ''Porträts'' (''Portraits''). * 2022:

David Zwirner David Zwirner (born October 23, 1964) is a German art dealer and owner of the David Zwirner Gallery in New York City, London, Hong Kong, and Paris. Early life and education Zwirner was born in Cologne, West Germany. The son of art dealer Rudolf ...

, New York

Group exhibitions

*2005:

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

Collections

Ruff's work is held in the following permanent public collection: *

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

, New York City: 5 prints (as of December 2020) *

Tate Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...

, UK: 5 prints (as of December 2020)

References

External links

Thomas Ruff at David Zwirner
incl. Selected Press, Exhibition Schedule

''Journal of Contemporary Art''

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ruff, Thomas 1958 births Living people Photographers from North Rhine-Westphalia Kunstakademie Düsseldorf alumni People from Ortenaukreis German contemporary artists 20th-century German photographers 21st-century German photographers