Thomas Ruff valuation
Tests what a photograph can be, from passport-style portraits two metres tall to pixelated pictures from the internet.
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.
What a work by Thomas Ruff is worth
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Bio
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.
The Bechers, the Häuser and Venice
Ruff studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 1977 to 1985, where Benjamin Buchloh's lectures shaped his serial method, and before the Portraits he photographed the interiors of German homes. Between 1981 and 1985 he made 60 small half-length portraits against coloured backgrounds, changing to light, neutral backgrounds for those of 1986 to 1991.
The Häuser, of 1987 to 1991, photographed ordinary buildings with distracting details removed digitally. He represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1995, and the Whitechapel Gallery gave him a retrospective in 2017.
Composite faces, Mies van der Rohe and press++
In 1992, experimenting with composite faces, Ruff came across the Minolta Montage Unit, a machine the German police used in the 1970s to merge four portraits into one with mirrors. He used it to build faces of people who do not exist, often mixing male and female features, for the Anderes Porträt series of 1994 and 1995. The architects Herzog & de Meuron asked him to photograph their Ricola building for the 1991 Venice Architecture Biennale, and in 1999 a commission at Haus Lange and Haus Esters in Krefeld grew into l.m.v.d.r., digitally altered views of buildings by Mies van der Rohe.
The Sterne of 1989 come from 600 negatives of the European Southern Observatory's survey of the southern sky, with details enlarged to one uniform size. The Nudes appeared as a book in 2003 with a text by Michel Houellebecq, and Aperture published JPEGs in 2009. For press++, first shown in Berlin in 2017, he scans the front and back of American press photographs from the 1920s to the 1970s, bought on eBay, and combines them with their crop marks, retouching and date stamps. He shares a studio in a former electricity station on the Hansaallee in Düsseldorf with Andreas Gursky, Laurenz Berges and Axel Hütte.
Best auction results
- jpeg pt01 £197,000
- From the jpegs series · London · 8 March 2017
- Publicly reported
- Reported as the highest auction price for one of his photographs.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
