PHOTO: Thomas Struth
Thomas Struth is best known for his genre-defying photographs, though he began originally with painting before he enrolled at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf in 1973. Struth has developed his individual photographic practice, often penetrating places of the human imagination in order to scrutinize the landscape of invention, technology, and beyond. Celebrated for his diverse body of work Struth continues to advance his vocabulary with each new series, while maintaining the same principles core to his practice.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery
Thomas Struth in his solo exhibition presents recent works created over the past two years from his ongoing series, “Nature and Politics “and “Family Portraits”. The presentation highlights new photographs from his investigation into science, technology and industry, created at the scientific institute CERN in Switzerland. These works are presented in relation to new portraits and landscape photographs. Bringing together disparate themes, Thomas Struth reflects on our contemporary condition and the interrelationships between technology, people, and nature. Since 2019, a few years after meeting CERN particle physicist Dr. James Beacham, Struth has developed a large cluster of works that explores the technological environments at the world’s largest scientific research center. These photographs, on display at the North Gallery, depict various scientific set-ups and high-tech machinery employed towards the study of the structure of the universe, ranging from the ALICE detector to cosmic ray testing devices, and more. Mediating between the North and South Gallery of Marian Goodman are new “Family Portraits”, a continuation of the series driven by Struth’s psychological interest in interfamilial relations since the late 1980s. Recently, Struth has resumed photographing families, tracing how distinct families compose themselves and constitute in their formation an identity as a social unit within the backdrop of our new reality of social distancing. The panoramic landscape “Schlichter Weg, Feldberger Seenlandscahft” (2021) , a photograph initiated in Germany during the pandemic, occupies a central position in the South Gallery. This monumental 4.5- meter work was shot in January 2021 near Struth’s country house and will be accompanied by related landscape works. The photograph shows a snow-covered landscape with several trees and shrubs in an ambiguous state between hibernation and decay. Since the late 1970s, Thomas Struth’s work has been distinguished by its precise and analytic engagement with public space and social structures; its prescient paradigm shifts have allowed adroit pivots in subject matter and approach over time. From his early black and white street pictures, which examined the unconscious societal processes that shape urban landscapes, Struth has sustained his interest in the ruptures inherent in architectural spaces and collective unconscious through many genres. His fascination in nature in relation to culture is explored in the landscape works, a visual experience that he subsequently repositions in the “Paradise” pictures, which immerse us in the primordial. Later, the museum series fused Struth’s interest in painting, reflecting on the individual and the relationship of an artwork to its beholder. An inquiry into the psychology of social portraiture, they record the act of looking in relation to history. This perspective is again repositioned in the “Audience” pictures, which mirror the process of an artwork’s loop of reception in regard to viewers in their own time. The act of incisive looking has marked Struth’s practice.
Photo: Thomas Struth, Schlichter Weg, Feldberger Seenlandschaft 2021, 2021 Inkjet print, Image: 85 1/4 x 177 1/8 in. (216.4 x 450 cm), Frame: 90 1/8 x 182 1/8 x 2 3/4 in. (229 x 462.6 x 7 cm), Edition of 6, © Thomas Struth, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
Info: Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 15/3-23/4/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.mariangoodman.com
