Thomas Ruff: nudes

The nudes series was created by Ruff downloading photographs from online pornographic thumbnail galleries and enlarging and distorting them to varying degrees. Literally and figuratively blurring the boundaries between pornography, formalist nude photography, and the art historical genre of the nude, with these works Ruff disengages the images from their original source, thus highlighting their formal and aesthetic value rather than simply their subject matter.

As with many of Ruff’s other series, these works explore the question of how much visual information is necessary. In contrast to the high resolution potential of digital photography, and to the porn industry’s ideal of sharp images for easy visual consumption, Ruff’s nudes appear painterly and almost abstract.