Thomas Ruff: jpegs ny at David Zwirner

David Zwirner's 533 West 19th Street space in Chelsea is showing Thomas Ruff: jpegs ny, on view from September 10 to October 17, 2026. Twelve works from jpegs ny, a subset of the artist's larger jpegs series, are derived from images of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. Ruff conceived the show as a commemoration for the twenty-fifth anniversary. The group was previously presented in the Unlimited sector at Art Basel 2026.

Ruff was in New York on September 11 and photographed the day and its aftermath extensively. Back in Germany several days later, he found his camera held no images. In 2004, with the event still on his mind, he began searching the internet for pictures of September 11 as a way to respond to a tragedy of such scale. He then changed their structure digitally, often raising the compression, reducing the pixels per centimeter, and adding color. This abstraction let him make the widely circulated images his own.

The prints are enlarged to the scale of nineteenth-century history paintings. The subjects stay legible but visibly blurred, and the grid of pixels takes the place of the brushstroke. As with Impressionist canvases, the whole image resolves only from a distance. Up close the large-format works look openly pixelated and sometimes nearly abstract.

Born in 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, West Germany, Ruff studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 1977 to 1985 and lives and works in Düsseldorf. David Zwirner has represented him since 2000. His solo exhibitions include The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2016, traveling to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2017), and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007).

Other editions from jpegs ny belong to The Broad, Glenstone Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Stedelijk Museum. A related work from the series is also on view in a Ground Zero 360 group exhibition at the New York City Fire Museum. Ruff has been invited to install a special presentation at Paris Photo at the Grand Palais in November, timed with his solo show at David Zwirner Los Angeles, his first there since 1990.