Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff (*1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany) is an established international figure in the field of photographic art. Starting out as one of the first representatives of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s class at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art in the 1980s, his works are now a fixture in any established photography collection. Serial work has accompanied his œuvre for over 40 years. Through his technical inventiveness, he repeatedly succeeds in placing the medium itself in new contexts and highlighting the discrepancy between the latest technology and old habits of perception. While in the beginning his photographic works typically consisted of series of purely objective, impartial depictions, such as portraits, buildings, interiors, his work has in the course of time become more and more concerned with the medium of photography itself and, by the same token, distanced itself more and more from the classical themes of photography. Since the late 1990s, Thomas Ruff has been increasingly preoccupied with the new possibilities afforded by digital photography, not least with the technical manipulability of images disseminated through the worldwide mass medium of the Internet with its inexhaustible source of material.

The works by Thomas Ruff are part of numerous international collections, such as Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Broad, Los Angeles; Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Rivoli; Centre Pompidou, Paris; corporate collection DZ BANK, Frankfurt; Fondation Cartier, Paris; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Julia Stoschek Foundation Düsseldorf, Dusseldorf; K20/K21 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Kunstmuseum Basel; mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; PinchukArtCentre Kiew, Ukraine; Schaulager Basel; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; Tate, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London.