Lot 542 D

Around 2000, Ruff began to break away from representational art in his digitally altered works, which were anyway merely reminiscent of traditional photographs, and to use image data from the Internet, which he had already implemented in his earlier series, to generate purely abstract, autonomous images. This media-reflexive approach resulted in the works of the series Substrate. "While searching for pictorial material for the series 'nudes', Thomas Ruff noticed that the images on the Internet no longer represented reality in principle, but were just electronically mediated visual stimuli. The inundation of images on the web, where images and information overlap, makes it almost impossible for the viewer to distinguish what image information is real or fake. With his experience in the digital field, Thomas Ruff wanted to penetrate this informational void." (cited from Matthias Winzen, in: (ed.), Thomas Ruff. Fotografien 1979 - heute, exhib.cat. Museum Folkwang, Essen i.a., Cologne 2001, p. 247)
Ruff used Manga-Comics as a model for his Substrate pictures, which he manipulated and merged layer by layer through complex calculation processes and superimpositions on the computer, until a picture was created, consisting of psychedelic-type, amorphous forms, devoid of any representationalism and merely reminiscent of the model in its garish colours.