Thomas Ruff. Modernism

The work of Thomas Ruff marks a paradigm change in photography: systematically and on an impressive level of aesthetic quality, the artist has for more than three decades been subjecting the medium of photography to a modernist analysis by introducing several formal innovations. One by one, Ruff has teased out basic parameters of the medium and their aesthetic interdependencies, taking photography beyond well-trodden paths. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that exhibitions and the literature to date have tended to neglect these circumstances: up to now, the artist’s work has repeatedly been presented and discussed exclusively in terms of its content and media-critical aspects.

The present examination focuses instead for the first time on the unique pictorial vocabulary Thomas Ruff has developed, which with its powerful and complex aesthetic demonstrates–while consistently reflecting on its medium–how the use of photography can be freed from its traditional patterns of application.