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 also 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 research and source imagery of September 11 from the internet. Using digital techniques, Ruff completely transformed 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.
Other editions from jpegs ny are held in the collections of The Broad, Los Angeles; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Concurrent with this exhibition, a related work from this series will be on view at a group exhibition at the New York City Fire Museum organized by Ground Zero 360, which will also commemorate the anniversary. The artist has also been invited to install a special presentation at Paris Photo at the Grand Palais, which will coincide with the opening of a solo show at David Zwirner Los Angeles in November 2026. That exhibition—Ruff’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles since 1990—will survey his production
over four decades of his career, highlighting the multiplicity of procedures he deploys to create his photographs.
