Thomas Ruff: jpegs ny — Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) rose to international prominence in the late 1980s as a member of the Düsseldorf School, a group of young photographers who had studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher and became known for their experimental approach to the medium and its evolving technological capabilities. Ruff in particular made a radical break with the style of his teachers, establishing a distinct approach to conceptual photography through a variety of strategies, including the use of color, the purposeful manipulation of source imagery—originally through manual retouching techniques and eventually through digital methods—and the enlargement of the photographic print to the scale of monumental painting. Working in discrete series, Ruff has since utilized these methods to conduct an in-depth examination of a variety of photographic genres, including portraiture, the nude, landscape, and architectural photography, among others. Highly influential to subsequent generations of photographers, Ruff's overarching inquiry into the "grammar of photography" accounts for not only his heterogeneous subject matter, but also the extreme variation of technical means used to produce his series, ranging from anachronistic devices to the most advanced computer simulators and covering nearly all ground in between.

In 2024, Ruff was the subject of the inaugural exhibition at Malkastenforum, the new building of the Malkasten artists’ association founded in Düsseldorf in 1848. A solo presentation of the artist’s work was on view at K20 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in 2020–2021. Works from tableaux chinois , alongside fifteen other series dating back to 1989, were on view in Thomas Ruff: after.images – Works 1989–2020 , a major solo exhibition of the artist’s work curated by Martin Germann at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, in 2021. In 2022, Thomas Ruff: Méta-photographie was on view at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole (MAMC+), France. Later in 2022, a two-person exhibition, Dark Matter , featuring work by Ruff and James Welling was presented at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany.

In 2018, Ruff was featured in Photography Spotlight , an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that celebrated the opening of the museum’s new Photography Centre. The artist created a new body of work titled Tripe as a special commission to inaugurate the space.