“Reset. Düsseldorf Photography after Thomas Ruff”, points to a moment in which established understandings of the image were fundamentally reconfigured in the early 2000s, when Thomas Ruff took up a professorship at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

As a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Ruff built on a legacy that had already defined Düsseldorf as a key center of contemporary photography.

At the same time, the image was confronted with new conditions: the growing ubiquity of images, digital developments, and new forms of distribution were beginning to reshape how photography was perceived and understood.

The exhibition presents works by artists who studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Thomas Ruff, who took over the photography class, following a vacancy of several years, after the retirement of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Works of the following german and Japanese photographers will be displayed in the exhibition:

Katlen Hewel works with overlays, layers, different planes, and projections, both in a metaphorical and in a literal sense.

Thomas Neumann seeks to look beyond the surface of photography. Often, it is a historical
interest that leads to a new body of work. In particular, he is preoccupied with the transitions between nature and culture, and between politics and the individual.

Naruki Oshima redefines spatial perception through the photographic medium, capturing a haptic condition that fluctuates between the concrete and the abstract—a pre-semantic stage before the subject resolves into meaning.

Anne Pöhlmann’s work moves between photography, sculpture, and installation, exploring processes of reproduction, memory, and cultural translation.

Thomas Ruff’s interest lies less in depicting the external world than in examining the medium of photography itself. He critically questions how images are created, how they shape our perception, and whether photography is even capable of objectively representing reality.

Martina Sauter investigates the photographic image at the intersection of fiction and reality. She utilizes various forms of collage, freely intermingling photography and film imagery through both analog and digital processes.

Juergen Staack transcends media boundaries in his work to ask: “What is an image, and what significance does it hold today?” He explores the fragility and transience of images and language, questioning the ways in which meaning is created. Chance and the moment play a significant role in his practice. In the series Tableaux, he placed glass plate negatives on untreated poplar wood for over a year, allowing the images to be exposed onto the wood to appear as “ghostly” motif.

Takashi Suzuki explores the relationship between vision and perception, with a focus on photography as a medium. In the series Fictum, he creates improvisational montages from images of cities photographed across Japan. By reconstructing images captured at different times and places—and from varying perspectives and distances—into seemingly continuous panoramas, he allows disconnected landscapes to assume the appearance of a unified scene.

Shigeru Takato’s photography focuses on traces of human activities, with strong interests in archaeology and anthropology.

Shinichi Tsuchiya utilized digital technology in his early works to re-examine the fundamental question of “Where am I?” at the dawn of the internet. A defining characteristic of his practice was the frequent use of systematic collages.



Exhibition dates & opening hours: 
13 June – 19 July 2026

Tuesday–Friday: 2 pm–8 pm
Saturday & Sunday: 2 pm–6.30 pm
Closed on Mondays