Installation view, Thomas Ruff: tableaux chinois, David Zwirner, Paris, 2021
David Zwirner is pleased to present recent photographs by the German artist Thomas Ruff at the gallery’s Paris location. The exhibition will feature works from Ruff’s tableaux chinois series (2019–), which debuted in fall 2020 as a part of his solo exhibition at K20 - Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, on view through February 7, 2021. Works from tableaux chinois, alongside fifteen other series dating back to 1989, will be included in after.images, a major solo exhibition of the artist's work curated by Martin Germann at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, opening in March 2021.
Ruff 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 at the renowned Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and became known for their experimental approach to the medium and its evolving technological capabilities.
Image: Thomas Ruff, tableau chinois_06, 2019 (detail)
Installation view, Thomas Ruff: tableaux chinois, David Zwirner, Paris, 2021
Installation view, Thomas Ruff: tableaux chinois, David Zwirner, Paris, 2021
Installation view, Thomas Ruff: tableaux chinois, David Zwirner, Paris, 2021
“[To create the tableaux chinois, Thomas Ruff] scanned over-idealized propaganda photographs … and then partially pixelated them.… At the same time, Ruff applied the layer of pixels only in particular areas, primarily in the background of the pictures, while it is erased in the primary areas, especially in the faces of the protagonists.… Thus, the digital and analog spheres overlap.”
—Falk Wolf, “Superimposing and Coloring,” in Thomas Ruff, 2020
“What photography captures is maybe not a found reality but a prearranged reality.”
—Thomas Ruff in conversation with Okwui Enwezor, in Thomas Ruff: Transforming Photography, 2019
Copies of La Chine magazine
Copies of La Chine magazine
In the early 2000s, Ruff came across a coffee table book on Mao Zedong, and became interested in Mao not only as a political figure but also as a cultural reference point for Western artists.
He scanned images from books on Mao and from La Chine, the magazine published and distributed worldwide by the Chinese Communist Party.
“[Ruff] makes images that are at once familiar clichés and estranged visions of our collective photographic order.… Artists have worked with found images in different ways but always in an attempt to make sense of a culture increasingly dominated by spectacle.”
—David Campany, “Thomas Ruff: Aesthetic of the Pixel,” IANN magazine, 2008
Erró, New Jersey, 1979–1980
Andy Warhol, Mao, 1972. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Thomas Ruff, Zeitungsfoto 026, 1990
“Artists such as Andy Warhol and Erró referenced Mao Zedong as a pop-cultural phenomenon. The title of Ruff’s series is a direct reference to Erró, whose series of paintings Tableaux chinois transports the figures of Chinese propaganda images to Western tourist attractions in a collage-like manner.”
—Falk Wolf, “Superimposing and Coloring,” 2020
“With his series, Ruff ties in directly with the Communist state propaganda of China. He lends the pictures produced for magazines the dimensions of wall paintings.… At the same time, he defamiliarizes the images by covering the background with a raster of pixels. This cipher for things digital catapults the images into the present.”
—Falk Wolf, “Superimposing and Coloring,” 2020
“The tableaux chinois series oscillates—depending on one’s point of view—between the global, intact pictorial impression and the impression of the production and distribution traces of the image.… Ruff has visually merged the technological processes of preparing photographs for their mass distribution from the two photographic eras on one pictorial plane.”
—Susanne Holschbach, “Flâneur, Researcher, Image Producer: Thomas Ruff and the Photographic Archive,” in Thomas Ruff, 2020
“When we glimpse pixels we do not think of authenticity (although we may do one day). The pixel represents a cold technological limit, a confrontation with the virtual and bureaucratic order that secretly unites all images in a homogenous electronic continuum, whether they are holiday snapshots or military surveillance.”
—David Campany, “Thomas Ruff: Aesthetic of the Pixel,” 2008
“For Ruff, the decisive factor regarding the success of any series of experiments is always the result—and the result is a new image.”
—Susanne Holschbach, “Flâneur, Researcher, Image Producer: Thomas Ruff and the Photographic Archive,” 2020
Installation view, Thomas Ruff: tableaux chinois, David Zwirner, Paris, 2021
Installation view, Thomas Ruff: tableaux chinois, David Zwirner, Paris, 2021
Installation view, Thomas Ruff: tableaux chinois, David Zwirner, Paris, 2021
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