For the past thirty years, Thomas Ruff’s work has redefined the limits and meanings of photography itself, consistently pushing historical conventions and expectations of the medium through the incorporation of technology. In this way, his work is a constant investigation of the possibilities of an image and its authorship.

Thomas Ruff is considered one of the most important photographers today. He belongs to the Dusseldorf School of Photography as a disciple of Bernd and Hilla Becher and studied alongside the likes of Candida Höfer and Andreas Gursky – together they are part of the school of thought that separates photography from the decisive moment and furthermore, from its journalistic function.

David Zwirner Gallery currently presents an important group of photographs by Thomas Ruff at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York. Featuring images from jpegs ny, a subset of the artist’s larger jpegs series, the twelve works on view are derived from images of the World Trade Center attacks in New York on September 11, 2001.

Coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks, this exhibition was conceived by the artist as a commemoration of that day. Prior to the exhibition in New York, this group of works was also on view as part of Unlimited at Art Basel 2026.

Ruff was in New York on September 11, 2001, and he shot numerous photographs documenting that day and its aftermath, but when he returned home to Germany several days later he realized there were no images on his camera.

Three years later, in 2004, the event was still front of mind for the artist. Seeking an appropriate artistic response to tragedy on such an unimaginable scale, he began to research and source imagery of September 11 from the internet. Using digital techniques, Ruff completely transformed the selected images by changing their structure, often increasing their compression, lowering the number of pixels per centimeter, and adding color.

Through these manipulations, he initiated a process of abstraction that would make these otherwise ubiquitous images his own. Blown up to the scale of traditional nineteenth-century history paintings, these works remain legible yet noticeably blurred, producing an almost painterly effect wherein grids of mechanical pixelation substitute for the expressiveness of a brushstroke, and, like the works of the impressionists, the full image only comes into view at a distance. The resulting large-format prints appear overtly pixelated and at times almost abstract.

Thomas Ruff
David Zwirner Gallery
New York, USA
September through October 2026
www.davidzwirner.com

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