Thomas Ruff

Print is from a broken down series of 8 from Schellmann

Ruff’s Substrate (Substratum) series takes its point of departure in Japanese anime and manga comics, which the artist accessed online, downloaded, and altered using digital imaging technology. Figurative elements give way to abstract, swirly shapes, while the bold colors of the original imagery are intensified, an indirect evocation of the sometimes violent and erotic nature of the comics. The resulting works can be seen as part of a long history of cameraless photography, yet their hallucinogenic, fluid patterns defy any genre. For Ruff, the evident lack of visual content here underscores the problematic relationship that exists between any photograph and its subject. Throughout his oeuvre, he has persistently explored how the photographic medium, often considered a “window onto the world,” is mistakenly equated with reality, despite the fact that each image is a construct. As Valentina Sonzogni describes, “The title Substrat provides the key to understanding the series, and indicates that Ruff is engaged in creating a new genre of abstract photography. In biochemistry, a ‘substrate’ is a molecule modified by an enzyme, while in linguistics, a ‘substratum’ is an element of a language identified as being a relic of an earlier language that is now extinct. The word also refers to geological layers. In short, a substrate is a layered structure that is subject to intervention.”

A continuation of Thomas Ruff’s celebrated Substrates series, this edition assembles eight images that dissolve narrative into layered color and light , transforming digital imagery into pure aesthetic experience. For Substrates, Ruff draws from internet-sourced comic images, layering and multiplying them through digital processing until they lose all narrative coherence. What remains are vibrant fields of swirling color and light, detached from clear meaning yet rich in visual impact. Thus, Ruff investigates the nature of contemporary visual culture, where virtual images are no longer representations of reality but autonomous aesthetic signals, abstract, seductive, and fundamentally ambiguous.

This edition is part of Schellmann's special 40th anniversary release - Fourty are Better than One, it is realised as a leporello that folds down to a 32 × 25 cm format.

This photograph is part of l.m.v.d.r. series. Based on the initials of renowned 20th century modernist architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe (1886-1969), this series began as a commission offered to Ruff in 1999-2000 in connection with the renovation of Haus Lange and Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany. Having worked with architectural subject matter since the mid-1980s, Ruff was enlisted to photograph the Krefeld buildings as well as the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa Tugendhat in Brno. Given the freedom to choose how the buildings would be rendered, Ruff was faced with the challenge of discovering a new way to capture these all-too-familiar and heavily documented monuments.

As in the spirit of Van der Rohe, who emphasized "not the what but the how," Ruff continues a conceptual line of how images are created. Fusing traditional elements with technological innovation, the photographs are both straight film and manipulated digital photography. Perception is of fundamental concern. By maneuvering camera angles and manipulating focus and color, Ruff heightens the reality that these are images of actual and historical sites.

In d.p.b 08, Ruff blurs the photograph and obliterates any true distinction between building and environment, mirroring the architect's ambivalence towards the traditional spatial relationship.

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Portrat 1989 - 2012 is part of a rigorous investigation into portraiture, identity, and the objective recording of the human face, drawing upon his foundational training under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Initiated as part of his systematic approach to typology, the series subverts traditional psychological portraiture by stripping away dramatic lighting, narrative context, and expressive emotion, presenting subjects with the deadpan neutrality of passport photographs or police mugshots.  

The print is structured as a high-definition frontal cataloging of the human visage, capturing subjects against neutral backgrounds with startling clarity. Although the standardized framing and blank backdrops deliberately eliminate overt biographical clutter, they paradoxically foreground subtle markers of socio-economic background, generational cohort, and cultural environment through the precise rendering of clothing, hair, posture, and facial expression.  

Ruff and Höfer

While Ruff's headshots use clinical neutrality to strip away narrative context and expose the subtle markers of individual identity and socio-economic background, Höfer takes the exact opposite path: she meticulously documents expansive, empty public and institutional interiors, libraries, museums, universities, and palaces, completely devoid of human subjects.

Where Ruff forces an intense, confrontational encounter with the human face as an objective typographic specimen, Höfer examines human presence through its total absence, allowing the architectural volumes, chairs, lighting fixtures, and spatial layouts to quietly reveal the social stratification, history, and cultural psychology of the people who inhabit and design those spaces.

The mounted print comes with its own stand.

The present work belongs to Ruff's untitled# series of abstract photographs, begun in 2022. These images were inspired by the work of Etienne Bertrand Weill, the pioneering French photographer best known for his Metaforms, which photographically recorded the movement of mobiles that the artist assembled from materials such as glass, wire, and wood; as well as by the rhythmograms, complex light patterns that visualize time and motion, created by Peter Keetman and Heinrich Heidersberger in the 1950s and 1960s.  To create his works, Ruff photographed a silver coil as it rotated in front of a black background using a long exposure to capture the motion. The artist then digitally edited the images, applying a blue halo effect to the edges of the photographs to mimic the appearance of vintage photography. He continued to photograph various wire constructions in his studio in this way resulting in a body of abstract imagery that evokes light itself as its subject matter.

In referring back to experimental techniques from the mid-twentieth century, Ruff raises broader questions about what constitutes a photographic image. As such, this series continues his interest in exploring the limits of photographic representation, reinventing in the process many of its familiar genres.

Part of the dyptich released by Schellmann in 2002 from Zeitungsfoto 071, Sterne 5.19.

Part of the dyptich released by Schellmann in 2002 from Zeitungsfoto 071, Sterne 5.19.

Print is from a set of 7.

This is one of the two special edition prints released with the limited edition book in a cardboard slipcase.

This is one of the two special edition prints released with the limited edition book in a cardboard slipcase.

This edition was published exclusively for the Krefeld Art Museums to mark the 70th anniversary of Museum Haus Lange,

PHG S.01 (2012), part of Ruff's Photograms series, continues his radical investigation into the nature of the photographic medium by dispensing with the camera entirely. Here Ruff resurrects and radically updates the early twentieth-century avant-garde technique of photogrammetry, originally explored by pioneers like Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy.

While their method invariably incorporated an element of chance in the final result, Ruff's photograms are derived from a virtual studio built by a custom software program, allowing the artist more control over the outcome. Their digital generation raises broader questions about what constitutes photography, and ultimately touches upon the issue of the medium’s veracity.

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Set of 8 prints, each signed by the artist.