Thomas Ruff is the type of the artist as a researcher, as an image demiurge, who understands the camera not only as an optical-mechanical notation device, but also as a powerful image-generating machine, with which he transforms the elements of found reality into a new pictorial reality according to need, criterion, and chosen recording system. As if on a keyboard, Ruff plays his way through the genres of photography, creating portraits, nocturnal city scenes, star images, landscapes, with press clips, press images with jpg's ideal and catastrophic images, photograms with a virtual darkroom, playfully alternating between archivist and photographer, between collector and producer of raw data, and finally often pouring them out into large-format panel pictures. Michael Stoeber needed the terms body machines, machine bodies, wish machines, computer (machines), sex machines to grasp the relationship between man and machine and Thomas Ruff's art as an image and thought machine. An image machine that incorporates the found, collected or produced raw materials of the first, second and third reality, transforms them and then pours them as a hybrid between "dream and nightmare, reality and illusion, evidence and mystery" into large framed surfaces - or, as in the photograms, simulates and generates them in a completely new, completely virtual way.
At the centre of the MAST exhibition are Thomas Ruff's "Machine" pictures. The "night" images, "houses", "other portraits", "Jpgs", "photograms" and "negatives" will be grouped around and through them. Together, these Ruff photographs will set the mood for a powerful chorus on the subject of machines and energies.

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