On an overcast summer’s day in Düsseldorf, Thomas Ruff arrived back from a lunchtime walk accompanied by a small brown poodle, whose trips across the floor to check out the weather would be our only interruption that afternoon. Ruff works from a beautiful studio designed for him in 2011 by the Swiss architects Herzog de Meuron, who designed Tate Modern.
This is the second they’ve done for him; the first is in a nearby building they converted a decade earlier for him and the artist Andreas Gursky, who, like Ruff, was a student at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the early 1980s. Photographs back then show Ruff with a head of long wavy hair, but now, at 59 a compact figure of medium height, his hair is neatly cut short. As he shows me round the enormous space lit by a tracer-line of halogen lights high above us, he offers the dog an exit to the garden, which it elegantly declines.
Despite the studio’s volume, there is relatively little of Ruff’s work in evidence. Instead there are objects from the collection he’s made over the years — a group of model spaceships, what looks like a life-sized dinosaur’s skull, an Ed Kienholz TV sculpture and, on the floor, a stack of 1920s German travel books bought recently at auction. On one table there is a computer, papers, books; on another a scale model of the interiors of the Whitechapel Gallery, where his retrospective opens later this month.
“He’s got this huge thinking space — I find it quite thrilling,” Iwona Blazwick, the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, told me. “Really, there is very little photography going on there. But a lot of thinking, a lot of figuring out, and a lot of models, bits of this and that. It’s like he’s sitting there thinking about it all, shuffling it around and figuring how to absorb it into his own repertoire.”