Thomas Ruff - Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Friday, March 4, 2011 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich; Private collection, Belgium

  • Catalogue Essay


    The linear series I call zycles, which is a combination of the words for the mathematical formula known as 'cycloid' in English and 'zykloide' in German. I didn't like the word in either language so I mixed them. The forms are virtual, generated by a mathematical formula that I manipulate by typing in different coordinates. The formula is very simple: one point rotating around a circle, and this circle rotating around another circle. ItÕs a double cycle common to us all: the earth rotating on its axis and around the sun.
    I'm very interested in the methods and grammar of photography, of how photography is looked at and distributed these days. We now have a lot of photographs that are no longer photographed, but created on a computer. It's virtual reality. So the idea was to create a form of virtual reality, but not as a realistic image. Because the computer is just bits and bytes, I wanted to create 'the image before the image'. And that for me, if you create it with a computer, is mathematics. THOMAS RUFF
    (I. Takayo , Thomas Ruff: cassini + zycles, "ART IT", December 16, 2009)

11

Zycles 3041

2008
Inkjet print on canvas.
93 x 159 3/4 in. (236.2 x 405.8 cm).
Signed and dated “Thomas Ruff 2008” and numbered of three on the reverse.  This work is from an edition of three.

Estimate
$120,000 - 180,000 

Sold for $98,500

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

4 March 2011
New York