Thomas Ruff: jpegs ny

David Zwirner is pleased to present an important group of photographs by Thomas Ruff at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York. Featuring images from jpegs ny, a subset of the artist’s larger jpegs series, the twelve works on view are derived from images of the World Trade Center attacks in New York on September 11, 2001. Coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks, this exhibition was conceived by the artist as a commemoration of that day. Prior to the exhibition in New York, this group of works was on view as part of Unlimited at Art Basel 2026.

Ruff was in New York on September 11, 2001, and he shot numerous photographs documenting that day and its aftermath, but when he returned home to Germany several days later he realized there were no images on his camera. Three years later, in 2004, the event was still front of mind for the artist. Seeking an appropriate artistic response to tragedy on such an unimaginable scale, he began to source and appropriate imagery of September 11 from the internet. Using digital techniques, Ruff altered the selected images by changing their structure, often increasing their compression, lowering the number of pixels per centimeter, and adding color. Through these manipulations, he initiated a process of abstraction that would make these otherwise ubiquitous images his own. Blown up to the scale of traditional nineteenth-century history paintings, these works remain legible yet noticeably blurred, producing an almost painterly effect wherein grids of mechanical pixelation substitute for the expressiveness of a brushstroke, and, like the works of the impressionists, the full image only comes into view at a distance. The resulting large-format prints appear overtly pixelated and at times almost abstract.