Thomas Ruff: Nudes

This title is out of print and available in a limited number of copies. Browse a selection of rare books here.

Text by Michel Houellebecq

Thomas Ruff, Düsseldorf-based photographer and conceptual artist, was born in 1958 and attended the Bechers's master class at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. He embarked on a truly striking career as an artist with a stunning series of large-format photos of artist friends, all printed with astonishing sharpness. Not long thereafter he again made a splash on the art scene with his "Sternenhimmel/Stars at Night," a second series of photographs, this time of the nocturnal firmament, once more printed in large formats.

Ruff's most recent work is devoted to a theme which, while being considered scandalous by the media, has won the highest awards the art world has to offer. In "Nudes," he focuses on pornography, or rather on stills taken from pornographic scenes he has found on the Web, and then processes them electronically before blowing them up to immense proportions. Digitally colored, alienated by blurring contours and at times eliminating focus, the content dissolves into more or less abstract fields of color, forcefully unnerving our perception, our expectations and our erotic fantasies.

A short story by Michel Houellebecq, Ruff's dream author for the occasion, unequivocally points to what the photographer's pictures are about, namely the act of solitary surfing through artificial worlds, the distance of purported intimacy, sex and love in the age of the Internet and of swinger clubs. In other words, the end of Romanticism.