ABOUT Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruf, now one of the leading artists in German photography, was born in 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany. He studied photography with Andreas Gursky and his wife Becher at the prestigious Art Academy in Düsseldorf, which is famous for producing artists such as Gerhard Richter.

Like Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, Ruf has produced conceptual photographs, including large-format color portraits of friends, interior scenes of typical German families, stars in the night sky, architecture, newspaper photos, and nudes.
He is also interested in the informational aspect of photography, with the idea that "most of the photographs we come across today are not real anymore," and he creates abstract works that image-process digital images, newspapers, old advertisements, surveillance cameras, 3D photographs, photographs downloaded from the Internet, satellite images, and so on, I create works that combine analog and digital elements, using photographs taken by others as source material and reconstructing the images.
The manner in which the images are processed and constructed is very intriguing and beautiful.