Thomas Ruff

2014

Between 1981 and 1991, the artist Thomas Ruff collected over 2500 newspaper photographs from German daily and weekly publications. Covering a broad range of topics such as politics, finance, sport, history, culture, science and technology, the images were chosen because they struck Ruff as unusual or odd in some way. It wasn’t until 1990, motivated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, that Ruff started to re-photograph these images to create his Newspaper Photographs series.

Thomas Ruff

Nudes

If, in our ‘virtual’ age, it can still be said that photographs furnish evidence, then Thomas Ruff’s body of work is testimony to the sheer wealth of practices, objects and forms available to photographers today. Ruff has been testing the limits of his medium for more than two decades, completing a dozen series of photographs that range from seemingly banal images of streets and buildings to computer-generated prints of sensuous psychedelic colour fields.