Studio: Thomas Ruff

For decades, Thomas Ruff has taken a skeptical yet conceptually serious approach toward investigating the photographic image. In each of his series, Ruff explores the technical conditions of the medium through various means, including the use of color, scale, and digital manipulation.

For his most recent series, tableaux chinois, Ruff examines the use of photographs in political propaganda, beginning with images sourced from La Chine, the French iteration of a periodical that Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party produced specifically for Europe. The series, now on view at David Zwirner in Paris, debuted in the fall of 2020 as part of the artist’s solo exhibition at K20 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.

Thomas Ruff in his Düsseldorf studio, 2020. Photo by Juergen Staack

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Since the early 2000s, Ruff’s photographic series have drawn exclusively upon material from external sources, such as images taken by a probe over Mars, processing and thematizing them in disparate contexts. These source materials—as well as model spacecrafts, dinosaur skulls, lunar atlases, among other objects collected for research—fill the artist’s bright Düsseldorf studio, designed by Herzog & de Meuron.

An interior view of Thomas Ruff’s Düsseldorf studio. Photo by Juergen Staack

A collection of prints, photographs, and ephemera in Thomas Ruff’s studio. Photo by Juergen Staack

A collection of model spacecrafts in Thomas Ruff’s studio. Photo by Juergen Staack

“My images are not images of reality but show a kind of second reality, the image of the image.”

—Thomas Ruff

tableau chinois_19a,
tableau chinois_19b,
2020

Thomas Ruff

tableau chinois_19a, tableau chinois_19b, 2020

Chromogenic print with Diasec

Diptych
Each: 94 1/8 x 72 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches
239 x 184 x 7 cm

Edition of 4

Each signed, dated, and numbered verso

“[To create tableaux chinois, Thomas Ruff] scanned over-idealized propaganda photographs … and manipulated 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, curator, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen

Installation view, Thomas Ruff: tableaux chinois, David Zwirner, Paris, 2021

“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, art and media historian

tableau chinois_17, 2020

Thomas Ruff

tableau chinois_17, 2020

Chromogenic print with Diasec

94 1/8 x 72 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches
239 x 184 x 7 cm

Edition of 4

Signed, dated, and numbered verso

“To understand how a pictorial genre actually works, I have to produce a series; I want to uncover the secret behind image generation.”

—Thomas Ruff

Installation views, Thomas Ruff, K20 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2020–2021. Photo © Achim Kukulies

“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, curator, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen

Issues of La Chine and other ephemera. Photo by Juergen Staack

Thomas Ruff leafs through images from his tableaux chinois series. Photo by Juergen Staack

Issues of La Chine and other ephemera. Photo by Juergen Staack

“In a technological sense these images are actually in the year 2020; in an ideological sense they remain in the 1960s and 1970s.”

—Thomas Ruff

tableau chinois_18, 2020

Thomas Ruff

tableau chinois_18, 2020

Chromogenic print with Diasec

94 1/8 x 72 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches
239 x 184 x 7 cm

Edition of 4

Signed, dated, and numbered verso

“I find images that lie fascinating. And, of course, propaganda photos always lie, because they represent a world that does not exist.”

—Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff in his Düsseldorf studio. Photo by Juergen Staack

An interior view of Thomas Ruff’s Düsseldorf studio. Photo by Juergen Staack

tableau chinois_10, 2019

Thomas Ruff

tableau chinois_10, 2019

Chromogenic print with Diasec

94 1/8 x 72 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches
239 x 184 x 7 cm

Edition of 4

Signed, dated, and numbered verso

“Every photograph is an assertion that I make.”

—Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff in his Düsseldorf studio. Photo by Juergen Staack

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