Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff was born at Zell am Harmersbach in Germany in 1958 and studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf under Bernd and Hilla Becher, alongside Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer. The Portraits he began in the early 1980s photographed friends frontally and without expression, like passport pictures, and from the mid-1980s were printed around two metres tall. What has followed is a run of enquiries into the image rather than into any subject: stars from an observatory's negatives, night-vision pictures, newspaper photographs, blurred nudes taken from the internet, jpegs enlarged until their compression breaks apart, NASA images of Mars and Saturn, and photograms made entirely on a computer. He succeeded Bernd Becher as professor at the Dusseldorf academy in 2000.

Everything is editioned, and many series were issued at more than one size as separate editions — the Portraits exist both small and very large — so series, dimensions and edition number together identify the work. Most prints are chromogenic or, in later series, inkjet prints, and many of the large ones are face-mounted to acrylic, a mounting that cannot be undone and that scratches, so surface condition matters a great deal and repair is rarely possible. Signature, title, date and edition are usually on the verso or a label, and the studio and his galleries hold the edition records.