Thomas Ruff

Q.i.C.

, 2021
  • Material
    Double-sided printing on thicker cardstock. Image side glossy, reverse side matt
  • Production Method
    Including a small brochure with a colored cover, format 21.5 x 15 cm, 42 pages, including 20 color illustrations and 20 full color pages.
    For his Collectors Edition, Thomas Ruff combined press photos of Queen Elizabeth II and her family from the 1940s with pages printed all over in pink. These press photos from an era without Photoshop were often retouched by hand. With some pictures one can almost speak of painting or overpainting. When looking at this selection, a whole family saga passes us by with all its tragic cases.
  • Edition Size
    30
  • Measurement
    15 x 20 cm
    Edition 30
    signed and dated on the back
  • Details about the frame
    Handmade maple wood frame, stained gray and waxed, external dimensions approx. 21.7 x 28.7cm. Incl. spacer strip and museum glass and rear suspension.
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About the Edition

A press photo is the basis for Thomas Ruff's signed edition "Q.i.C." ("Queen in Car") from 2021. It shows: Queen Elizabeth II, who was recently buried, with her husband Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and her sister Princess Margaret in a black limousine on arrival at Marlborough House in London, where her grandmother Queen Mary lay dying in 1953. In the edition we see the picture once with and once without the explanatory text. What does it tell us without the concrete classification in its context? Between 1981 and 1991, Ruff created a whole series of newspaper photos that he had collected. He reproduced them in double-column width without a caption in order to question the relationship between photographers and newspaper editors and their influence on the information content of a news item. "I am more interested in the picture than in reality," the artist once said. He also gives us the opportunity to look more closely and without prejudice.

About the artist

Thomas Ruff started out in the photography class of the famous artist couple Hilla and Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Right from the start, he approached photography with a picture idea, with a concept, which he always creates in series. From the early interiors of typical German living spaces and large-format portraits of his fellow students, he continued to explore his artistic medium in new ways. He worked with night vision cameras, telescopic images or pornographic images from the internet. The artist gave up analogue photography long ago.

Ruff is one of the best-known photo artists of his generation. His work has found its way into numerous important museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute in Chicago, the Essl Museum in Austria, the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York as well the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent. Since 2000, Ruff has been represented by the New York gallery David Zwirner, among others.

Latest Exhibitions (Selection)

Until October 22, 2022, the David Zwirner gallery in New York was showing new works by Thomas Ruff with the "d.o.pe." series - the title is based on Aldous Huxley's autobiographical work "The Doors of Perception". ") from 1954.
In 2020/21 there was a comprehensive retrospective with works by Thomas Ruff in the K20 - Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. In 2021, Galerie David Zwirner presented works from the “tableaux chinois” series in Paris, which began in 2019. In the same year, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung hosted a major solo show, Thomas Ruff: after.images – Works 1989-2020.

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