Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole, Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, France
May 2022
May 14–August 28, 2022 The MAMC+ is presenting the first exhibition in a French museum by the German photographic artist Thomas Ruff. Titled Metaphotography, this retrospective includes over forty years of Ruff’s career and aims to reveal the way in which the artist tirelessly questions the photographic medium itself, developing a “meta-photography.” Through seventeen series—including a new series titled Bonfils, 2022—the exhibition will present around one hundred artworks that form a chronology of the various types of imagery and technical processes that Ruff investigates, thus implicitly retracing a history of photography. Ruff started his series of Interiors and Portraits in the 1980s, when he was still a student of Bernd Becher at the fine arts academy Kunstakademie, in Düsseldorf. Although these artworks became emblematic of his work, he nevertheless continued to explore many other approaches to photography. Beginning in the 1990s, Ruff chose to only use pre-existing images, which he then manipulates. The titles for his serial experiments illustrate the continually renewed diversity of his subjects, which the exhibition reflects: Stars, Press Photographs, Nights, Nudes, Portraits, ma.r.s, Photograms, Flowers, Chinese Paintings, and so on. This exploration of camera technology and image production encompasses all kinds of photographs, while reinventing them, from satellite images to digital tools, to non-digital negatives and JPEGs. In drawing from existing photography, Ruff probes the medium’s capacity for technological evolution and the status of images, while constantly questioning photographic objectivity.