Artist: Thomas Ruff

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of work by the German artist Thomas Ruff (b. 1958), on view across two floors of its space in London, marking the artist’s first solo show in the city since his critically acclaimed presentations at Whitechapel Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery in 2017, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2018, where he was commissioned to create a series to inaugurate its Photography Centre.

The ground floor features two recent series - expériences lumineuses (begun 2024), on view for the first time in this presentation, and untitled# (begun 2022) - that together represent a departure in Ruff’s ongoing investigation of photographic abstraction. For both bodies of work, instead of using found or digitally rendered images or generating them with a computer program, Ruff takes the photographs himself in a darkroom he constructed to create the resulting compositions, returning to a mode of production that defined his early career.

The first floor of the gallery will be dedicated to a survey of works from key series chosen by the artist, including Porträts (Portraits, 1981–1991/1998–2001), Substrat (Substratum, 2001–), jpegs (2004–), cassini (2008–2011), Fotogramme (Photograms, 2012–), flower.s (2018–), and d.o.pe. (2022–). Spanning forty years, this selection illustrates Ruff’s experimental approach to the medium, the breadth of his visual strategies, and his in-depth examination of photographic genres through processes both analogue and digital, which produce a range of abstract and figurative imagery. This will be the artist’s thirteenth exhibition with David Zwirner.