Thomas Struth
Photographs 1978 – 2010
26 Feb - 19 Jun 2011
Düsseldorf and Berlin based artist Thomas Struth is among the major representatives of the German photo scene. Numerous exhibitions over the past 15 years in Europe, the US, Japan, China, have earned this native of Germany’s Lower Rhine region an international reputation. As early as 1992, Struth’s works were on view at the documenta IX in Kassel. While to date only individual work series have been presented publicly, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen now offers the first European representative survey of Struth’s production as a whole.
The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich. The Swiss version will be supplemented to more than 100 motifs for the Düsseldorf presentation, which will feature a series of recent works, none of which have yet been shown publicly. A strong emphasis lies on the work of the past ten years. At K20 Grabbeplatz Struth has exclusively designed a new space-filling installation for one exhibition gallery.
Thomas Struth – who was trained at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, initially studying painting with Gerhard Richter, and photography with Bernd Becher beginning in 1976 – places exactitude of vision at the center of his aesthetic concerns. From the early Düsseldorf street scenes, to his images of the impenetrable undergrowth of the Asian jungle (“Paradises”), to the large-format museum pictures (“Audiences”), and all the way to the recent images of large-scale technical facilities: Struth repeatedly thematizes the relationship between beholder and subject. He avoids any obvious dramatization of his motifs, which he discovers on trips throughout Europe, the Americas, East Asia, and Australia. At a time when we are assaulted daily by a veritable flood of imagery, Thomas Struth is among the small number of outstanding artists who have succeeded in investing the photographic medium with a new intensity and potency.
Additional exhibition venues are London (Whitechapel Gallery, 06.07. - 16.09.2011) and Porto (Museu Fundação Serralves, 14.10. 2011 - 29.01. 2012)
The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich. The Swiss version will be supplemented to more than 100 motifs for the Düsseldorf presentation, which will feature a series of recent works, none of which have yet been shown publicly. A strong emphasis lies on the work of the past ten years. At K20 Grabbeplatz Struth has exclusively designed a new space-filling installation for one exhibition gallery.
Thomas Struth – who was trained at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, initially studying painting with Gerhard Richter, and photography with Bernd Becher beginning in 1976 – places exactitude of vision at the center of his aesthetic concerns. From the early Düsseldorf street scenes, to his images of the impenetrable undergrowth of the Asian jungle (“Paradises”), to the large-format museum pictures (“Audiences”), and all the way to the recent images of large-scale technical facilities: Struth repeatedly thematizes the relationship between beholder and subject. He avoids any obvious dramatization of his motifs, which he discovers on trips throughout Europe, the Americas, East Asia, and Australia. At a time when we are assaulted daily by a veritable flood of imagery, Thomas Struth is among the small number of outstanding artists who have succeeded in investing the photographic medium with a new intensity and potency.
Additional exhibition venues are London (Whitechapel Gallery, 06.07. - 16.09.2011) and Porto (Museu Fundação Serralves, 14.10. 2011 - 29.01. 2012)