About the work

For the Whitechapel Gallery, Thomas Ruff has created a new work from his flower.s series, on the occasion of the gallery’s 125^th Anniversary. 

In flower.s, Ruff continues his exploration of the history of the photographic medium, revisiting an analogue technique known as pseudo-solarization, or the Sabattier effect. Originally discovered by chance, this technique involves exposing photographic film to a diffuse secondary light in the darkroom, thereby partially inverting the light and dark areas of an image. Popular with Surrealist artists such as Man Ray and Lee Miller, Ruff transports the technique to the realm of digital imaging. First, he made flower arrangements on a lightbox, photographed them, and uploaded the digital files to a virtual darkroom on his computer. Applying an equivalent of the Sabattier effect, he then superimposed the positive and negative areas and printed the final images on aged paper. Similar to the 'Photograms', he uses contemporary means to reference an “old” photographic technique and shifts the boundaries of its possibilities. Unlike the analogue process, which invariably involves an element of chance, the artist here had complete control over the outcome. 

About the artist

Fascinated by the various possibilities of photography, Thomas Ruff has employed analogue, dark-room techniques alongside computer-generated and digital images, photographs from scientific archives, and those appropriated from the Internet and print publishing in his oeuvre. With a focus on process and aesthetics, Ruff has approached topics including political propaganda, portraiture and the military application of, and manipulation of, photographic technologies, always with a questioning of the veracity of the image.

Selected Exhibitions

Thomas Ruff (b. 1958, Zell am Harmersbach, West Germany) lives and works in Düsseldorf. Ruff's work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions internationally. His work is held in museum collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Austria; Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent.