Nudes ev 19. 2006.
Chromogenic print, mounted on plexiglass in diasec.
Signed, dated, titled "ev 19" and numbered on the reverse. One of just five copies. Image: 139.5 x 90 cm (54.9 x 35.4 in). Frame dimensions: 159,5 x 110 cm (62,8 x 43,3 in).
[CH].
• The series of the "Nudes" addresses the end of privacy and the abolition of the former border between private and public space, at the same time it blurs the difference between pornography and formalistic nude photography.
• Photography without a camera: For "Nudes", the artist uses pornographic images downloaded from the Internet, which he then alienates digitally, meaning he enlarges them, changes the colors or blurs them.
• Comparable works from this series can be found in the most important museum collections world-wide, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the K20 / Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
• In 2005 Ruff took part in the 51st Biennale di Venezia.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Stephen Hoffman, Munich.
Private collection Southern Germany (acquired from the above in 2007).

"Taken from porn sites, Thomas Ruff's ongoing series 'Nudes' thwarts the urge to see more and more - and by so doing brings us back to our senses. [..]. Porn takes the universal desire to have sex and delivers it and improves on it: perfect bodies, no disease or impotence [..], no heartbreak, no regrets, no consequences. But by blurring these images Ruff improves them in the opposite direction. They acquire the uncertainty of memory, the imprecision of unenacted fantasy, the unfocusable swirl of the unconscious, of dreams. [..]. Though they are arranged with only one thing in mind, the original lighting is coaxed into gorgeous subtleties; colors become nuanced, delicate, or expressionistically garish. [..]. The photographs impart a lyricism to the source material; or, particularly in the recent work, they lay bare the ghastliness and vulgarity of an industry that aims to service desire so thoroughly, so instantly. [..] More than a few of them - particularly older ones from the series - are reminiscent of paintings Gerhard Richter derived from photographs. Given the shared smudge and smear and a similarly slurred palette, this is hardly surprising. What was surprising, as I looked at some of these nudes, was that I found myself thinking not just of Richter's pictures of people but of his landscapes. And then I remembered Alberto Moravia's suggestion that a woman's body might be all that modern man any longer possesses of nature."
Geoff Dyer, Porn and the shadow side of paradise: Thomas Ruff's Nudes, in: The Guardian, 2.3.2012, zit. nach: www.theguardian.com.