Thomas Ruff

The MAMC+ is presenting the first exhibition in a French museum by the German photographic artist Thomas Ruff.

This retrospective gaze concerning over forty years of his career aims to reveal the way in which the artist tirelessly questions the photographic medium itself, developing a “meta-photography”. Through a selection of seventeen series, including one as yet unseen (Bonfils, 2022) the visit of around one hundred artworks restores a chronology of the various types of imagery and technical processes that he investigates, thus implicitly retracing a history of photography.

German artist Thomas 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 explored many other approaches to photography, choosing from the 1990s to use only pre-existing images, which he manipulates. The titles of 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. Fundamentally, for this artist who draws on existing photography, it is a matter of probing the medium’s capacity for technological evolution and the status of images, while constantly questioning photographic objectivity.