Thomas Ruff: expériences lumineuses

Working in discrete series, Thomas Ruff has conducted an in-depth examination of a variety of photographic genres throughout his career, 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.

In London, the ground floor features two recent series—expériences lumineuses, on view for the first time in this presentation, and untitled#—that represent an expansion of Ruff’s ongoing investigation of photographic abstraction.

After photographing the reflections and refractions that resulted from these arrangements, Ruff then digitally inverted the images so that the play of light would appear as dynamically intersecting lines or stripes in the composition. Printed on velvety matte surfaces, these works on canvas appear almost as painterly abstractions, though they are actually photographs documenting scientific phenomena.

A throughline to the newer series, the earliest work in the exhibition is a never-before-seen print from Ruff’s Porträts (Portraits, 1981–1991/1998–2001). The subjects in this breakthrough body of work—frequently his friends, fellow students, and colleagues—are always expressionless, set against a neutral background and often looking directly at the viewer, as if posing for a passport photograph.

By contrast, Ruff has since become known for working outside and beyond the apparatus of the camera, establishing a distinct approach to conceptual photography through a variety of strategies, including the purposeful manipulation of computer-generated or preexisting source imagery. Among these are jpegs, begun in 2004; Substrat (Substratum), begun in 2001; and d.o.pe., begun in 2022.

These themes are further explored in Ruff’s negatives series, begun in 2014. The examples above, which are on view in London, are based on photographs of the German dancer Lavinia Schulz. For these works, Ruff inverts existing photographs into negatives.

Ruff has noted: “[The negative] was actually never considered for itself, it was always only a means to an end.... [I turned] photographs into negatives in order to see their photographic reality reversed. In doing so I noticed that in some of them the light-dark distribution and the composition is far more readily appreciated in the negative than in a paper print. The contrasts were stronger, the figures and objects seemed suddenly more three-dimensional.… Figures were more reminiscent of marble sculpture than photographs of real people.”

As with the negatives, Ruff worked with found imagery as the basis for Star 16h 56m / -40°, which represents an extension of his Sterne (Stars) series from 1989–1992. Alongside photography, astronomy had long been a persistent interest of the artist’s, and he was frustrated by his inability to create his own images of space and the night sky. He therefore purchased a collection of negatives from the European Southern Observatory, which he utilized to print large-scale, nearly abstract starscapes. As with much of Ruff’s oeuvre, his images of stars underscores the artist's ongoing questioning of the notion of photographic veracity.