CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/13/2015

Thomas Ruff: Editions 1988–2014

Featured image, from Thomas Ruff's Substrates series (2003), is reproduced from Hatje Cantz's new book on Ruff's editions, 1988 through 2014. Contributor Valeria Liebermann explains that the series spun off from the artist's web research for his nudes series, which covered "as broad a spectrum as possible of sexual fantasies and practices" that can be found online. "Ruff noticed while searching for image material for the nudes that the virtual images on the Internet essentially no longer represent reality but are merely visual stimuli conveyed by purely electronic means. The flood of images on the Net, where images and information are superimposed, hardly afford the viewer an opportunity to decide what of the image information is real and what is virtual. Ruff set out to penetrate this terrain of visual nothingness using his experience in digital image processing. To this end, he used comic images as the material, superimposing them in several layers and multiplying with one another until he had an image that was more or less devoid of meaning."