Thomas Ruff

ACTIVE BACKLIST

THOMAS RUFF: SCHWARZWALD LANDSCHAFT
Text by Jochen Ludwig, Christiane Grathwohl-Scheffel.
VERLAG FüR MODERNE KUNST NüRNBERG
ISBN: 9783941185517 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 4/30/2010
Active | Awaiting stock

THOMAS RUFF: SURFACES, DEPTHS
VERLAG FüR MODERNE KUNST NüRNBERG
ISBN: 9783941185500 | US $60.00
Pub Date: 11/30/2009
Active | Awaiting stock

THOMAS RUFF: JPEGS
Text by Bennett Simpson.
APERTURE
ISBN: 9781597110938 | US $85.00
Pub Date: 5/31/2009
Active | In stock

THOMAS RUFF: M.D.P.N.
CHARTA
ISBN: 9788881585588 | US $34.95
Pub Date: 1/1/2006
Active | In stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

THOMAS RUFF: MACHINES
Essays by Caroline Flosdorff and Michael Stüber.
HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9783775714235 | US $39.95
Pub Date: 1/2/2004
Out of print | Not available

THOMAS RUFF: 1979 TO THE PRESENT
Edited by Matthias Winzen. Essays by Ute Eskildsen, Valeria Liebermann and Per Boym.
D.A.P./DISTRIBUTED ART PUBLISHERS, INC.
ISBN: 9781891024726 | US $75.00
Pub Date: 12/2/2003
Out of print | Not available

Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff: Schwarzwald Landschaft

Text by Jochen Ludwig, Christiane Grathwohl-Scheffel.
Published by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg

German photographer Thomas Ruff (born 1958) is closely associated with the city of Düsseldorf though his studentship under Bernd and Hilla Becher, but he actually hails from the small town of Zell am Harmersbach, in the Black Forest. Ruff's Interior series, made during his student days (prior to the Bechers) between 1979 and 1983, is located there. Taken in the homes of his family and friends, and photographed in sober black and white, it draws the viewer immediately into the atmosphere of 1960s and 1970s Germany, showing the farmhouse in which Ruff's mother grew up, along with its barn, toolshed and silo, a young bull and nearby woodland paths. When Ruff undertook his long-term Jpegs project, imagery of the Black Forest cropped up again. All of Ruff's Black Forest-related series are collected in this catalogue, along with two other series, Stars and Nudes.

Thomas Ruff: Surfaces, Depths

Edited by Gerald Matt. Text by Catherine Hug, Douglas Fogle, Kurt W. Forster, Gerald Matt. Interview by Gerald Matt with Thomas Ruff.
Published by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg

Surfaces, Depths is a representative selection of Thomas Ruff's works, over a period that already spans about 25 years, with projects ranging from portraits and interiors to telescope and space probe pictures and "nightsight" photography. Ruff incorporates an extremely wide range of everyday subjects into his experiments--people, architecture, planets, the Internet--and subjects them to all forms of camera technology, so that his work often seems to embody the history of the art as it develops. Ruff has a particular fascination with photographic techniques that appear to erase or leave out the artist's hand, techniques often designed for military or scientific purposes. In a recent series titled Zycles, for example, Ruff constructs his images with the help of mathematical formulas and computer technology, twisting two-dimensional surfaces into the three-dimensional space of vector graphics. Surfaces and Depths focuses on ten of Ruff's total of 18 projects to address this particular ongoing preoccupation with artistic detachment, and the polarities of surface and depth vision in the construction of images. In doing so, it makes the broadest assessment to date of the oeuvre of this tireless innovator.

Thomas Ruff: Jpegs

Text by Bennett Simpson.
Published by Aperture

How much visual information is needed for image recognition? A pretty small quantity of data will go a long way for the brain and the computer, both of which take shortcuts for the sake of speedy comprehension. In the Jpegs series, German photographer Thomas Ruff exploits this imprecision in digital technology, locating online jpegs and enlarging them until the pixels emerge in a chessboard pattern of near abstraction. A closer look at these images reveals that, in addition to the degeneration of the image into a digital grid, the color and brightness generated by the algorithms of the compression also become visible. Many of Ruff's works in this series focus on idyllic, seemingly untouched landscapes, or conversely, on scenes of war and nature disturbed by human manipulation--subjects ill suited to disruptive pixelation, and therefore perfect for Ruff's purposes. Taken together, these images constitute an encyclopedic compendium of contemporary visual culture that also engages the history of landscape painting. A fittingly deluxe and oversize volume, Jpegs is the first monograph dedicated exclusively to this monumental series.

Thomas Ruff: M.D.P.N.

Edited by Fabrizio Tramontano. Essays by Giovanni Leoni, Giancarlo Cosenza and Luigi Cosenza. Introduction Giancarlo Cosenza.
Published by Charta

Shortly after graduating in Bridge and Road Engineering in 1929 and being appointed to the rank of reserve lieutenant, I took a look around my city. There were no patterns to follow--only examples to imitate. The grand extravagant projects were the monopoly of the regime of arrogance and favoritism. A modern fish market was needed to replace the grubby pietra del pesce" on Via Marina. I studied the problem on the spot and visited various other fish markets in Pozzuoli, Milan, Venice, Marseilles, Ostend, Hamburg." This is how Luigi Cosenza (Naples, 1905-1984) describes the genesis of his first project, the Mercato del pesce di Napoli (Fish Market of Naples), built in 1929 and considered the manifesto of the city's rational architecture. This book documents the "M.D.P.N." building in equally rational and elegant images from Germany's renowned Thomas Ruff, beginning with photographs taken in the dazzling light of an early afternoon in September 2002.

Thomas Ruff: Machines

Essays by Caroline Flosdorff and Michael Stüber.
Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers

Arguably the most versatile artist of the Dsseldorf School, Thomas Ruff reinvents himself as an artist, both conceptually and aesthetically, with each new body of work. From architectural photography to portraits, from aerial views and cityscapes to color abstractions and internet-derived nudes, Ruff constantly challenges the given meanings of photography. This book presents for the first time his most recent body of work, the so-called "Machine" pictures. In this series, Ruff borrows from the picture archive of a Dsseldorf machine factory, where he discovered glass negatives that had been used for commercial brochures. The artist scanned the negatives and then proceeded to digitally alter their color and size. By freeing these images from their original context and re-processing them, Ruff grants them a pictorial autonomy. Thus, with the Machines series, Ruff not only investigates the history of photography, but also ponders such fundamental questions as how something can appear in a picture, how we perceive pictures, and what role our assumptions about media play.

Thomas Ruff: 1979 to the Present

Edited by Matthias Winzen. Essays by Ute Eskildsen, Valeria Liebermann and Per Boym.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.

All fields of contemporary Western life are captured by the lens of Thomas Ruff's large-format camera: petit bourgeois homes in the provinces and suburbs; modernist and current architectural structures; the startlingly alien faces of fellow human beings; the technologically sophisticated observation of outer space; studies of local neighborhoods by night; the news industry's non-stop invention of pictures; changing views on how we feel about our bodies; and modifications in perceptions through the pictorial explosion of the Internet. Since the early 1980s, Thomas Ruff has created a substantial photographic oeuvre in which he draws our attention to all of these familiar subjects, simultaneously marshalling a precise, fascinating rendition of our perceptual universe and a conceptually matter-of-fact presentation of untold layers of meaning and photographic premises. This catalogue gathers, for the first time, all of the work he has created since 1979, placing his most important and familiar works in the context of his entire oeuvre. Substantial reproductions are accompanied by scholarly essays, an annotated catalogue raisonn» of works since 1979 and an illustrated biography.