PHOTO:Thomas Struth-Nature & Politics
Τhomas Struth is renowned for his practice of creating singular images, each within strictly segregated subject fields: architecture, portraiture, landscape and, most recently, sites of technological and scientific research. His photographs are characterized by their lush colour and extreme attention to detail, which, because of their large size have a mesmerizing effect.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Museum Folkwang Archive
The exhibition “Nature & Politics” explores in depth diverse strands of Struth’s enquiry, whilst also elaborating the interstices between them, to present the most significant current monograph of the artist’s work. Struth seeks, in his own words, “To open the doors to what our minds have materialised and transformed into sculpture and to scrutinise what our contemporary world has created in places which are not accessible to most people”. His images penetrate and report on the material spaces of the human imagination, and they are born from an accelerated moment when technology and the image industry have brought physical reality and the imagination closer together. Ιn the recent years technology and the constructed landscape have become overarching subjects for Struth. Photographing at sites of techno-industrial and scientific research, including physics institutes, pharmaceutical plants, space stations, dockyards, nuclear facilities and operating theatres, he has focused on machines which are some of the transformative instruments of our contemporary world, and edifices of technological production where the heights of human knowledge are enacted, debated and advanced. These works explore the aesthetics of innovation and experimentation through the recording of structural complexities and allude to the hidden structures of control, power and influence exerted by advanced technologies. The pictures are surely testament to the strength of humankind’s imaginative and technical capacities. However, Struth’s works also show how technology and technological progress can place excessive demands upon us. Only a select few, after all, are able to work these machines. Nevertheless, while a high degree of expertise is required to operate these levers and tubes, it is still possible to be in awe of the tremendous accomplishments of those who built them.
Info: Museum Folkwang, Museumsplatz 1, Essen, Duration: 4/3-29/16, Days & Hours: Tue, Wed & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri 10:00-20:00, www.museum-folkwang.de
