Thomas Ruff: expériences lumineuses

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of work by the German artist Thomas Ruff at the gallery’s location in London. Expériences lumineuses marks the artist’s first solo show in the city since his critically acclaimed presentations at Whitechapel Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery in 2017, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2018, where he was commissioned to create a series to inaugurate its Photography Centre. The exhibition juxtaposes new and recent series, presented on the ground floor, with a selection of images surveying Ruff’s career on the first floor, together demonstrating his expansive approach to photography. This is the artist’s thirteenth solo presentation with David Zwirner.

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. Working in discrete series, Ruff has since conducted an in-depth examination of a variety of photographic genres, including portraiture, the nude, landscape, and architectural photography, among others. The artist’s overarching inquiry into the "grammar of photography" accounts for not only his heterogeneous subject matter but also the extreme variation of technical means used to produce his series, ranging from anachronistic devices to the most advanced computer simulators and covering nearly all ground in between.