Thomas Struth

Born at Geldern in 1954, Thomas Struth began his artistic training by studying painting under Peter Kleemann and Gerhard Richter at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf (1973-75). He brought himself up to date on the latest trends in art by visiting the Peter Ludwig Collection in Cologne, one of the largest in Germany devoted to pop art, minimal and conceptual art, then housed at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, and researched the work of directors like Akira Kurosawa and Nagisa Oshima, the neo-realists Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini and the French auteurs François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol. He approached the medium of photography through Richter’s teaching and in 1976 turned away from painting and enrolled in the photography course held by Bernhard Becher in the same academy. At the same time, his reading of texts such as Wolfgang Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology and Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History gave him the essential theoretical instruments to plan his personal research, centred from this time on the specific ability of the image to reveal the sense of the reality represented. In 1978 he won a grant from the academy and went to New York, where he produced one of his urban landscapes in black and white and organized his first solo exhibition at the P.S.1 gallery. Sensitive to the teaching of the Bechers but also the work of French photographers of the nineteenth century, such as Eugène Atget (1857 – 1927) and Charles Marville (1816-1878), Struth started a systematic work of documentation, in which he portrayed roads, buildings and industrial sites in different parts of the world, from the United States to Japan, using his lens to capture objective fragments of current reality. From the second half of the 1980s he extended his research to new iconographic themes such as the facades of churches or historically significant monuments and began to work in cycles. Using the same large format as in cityscape, he began a series of portraits in colour and black and white of individuals and family groups Familie Leben [Family Life]. This last group of photographs, in particular, grew out of a collaborative project with the psychoanalyst Ingo Hartmann, which began in 1982. It consisted of analyzing the snapshots that Hartmann’s patients brought to therapy. By their value as psychosocial documents, the works of this cycle relate to the epic photographic series by the German August Sander (1876–1964), Das Antlitz der Zeit [The Face of Our Time, 1929] and were exhibited by Struth in 1992 in the exhibition Family Album – Changing Perspectives of Family Portraits at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. No less pregnant, however, were his individual portraits, such as The Late Giles Robertson (with Book), Edinburgh [1987, The Tate Collection, London], whose intelligent discretion testifies to a conception of photography as an instrument for psychological exploration and analysis and not as a voyeuristic or fetishistic medium. His interest in Renaissance painting, which emerged in his work on portraiture as well as other works such as Restoration Workers in San Lorenzo, Naples 1988 [Museo Nacional Del Prado, Madrid], led the artist in 1989 to conceive his best-known cycle, Museum Photographs, consisting of large-format colour photographs taken in the world’s greatest museums to capture the anonymous crowd gazing intently at masterpieces of the history of Western art. The same penetrating capacity of observation as in the portraits appears in the series Garden am Lindberg, which consists of photographs on a reduced scale and of an intimate character of flowers and scenes of gardens. They were commissioned in 1991 by a private clinic in Wintherthur, Switzerland, for display in the rooms of patients. From this experience stems Struth’s interest in nature as an independent photographic subject, culminating in the large-format prints of the Paradise series (1998-2001), taken in forests, deserts and jungles in Japan, Australia, China, America and Europe. After participating in the Sculptur Projekte survey at Münster (1987), in 1988 he exhibited in the group show Another Objectivity, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, which sought to define a current of research born in Germany in the wake of the Bechers’ work. His participation in the Open ’90 section of the longed-for 44th Venice Biennale marked Struth’s international recognition as one of the greatest interpreters of contemporary photography, confirmed in 1992 by the invitation to Documenta IX at Kassel. From 1993 to 1996 he lectured on photography at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe and in 1997 received the Stiftung Niedersachsen International Spectrum Photography Prize. Following the anthological exhibitions held in 2002 at the Dallas Museum of Art and the MOCA in Los Angeles, in 2003 his work was presented at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, with the screening of an hour-long video of portraits on which Struth had been working since 1996. In 2007 the photographs Struth took at the Prado in Madrid were exhibited in the same rooms where they were taken, creating a spatial-temporal short circuit between reality and image, between painting and photography. Today he lives and works in Düsseldorf.
 

Thomas Struth. New pictures from paradise
Ingo Hartmann
Hans Rudolf Reust
GERMANY Munchen - 2002
Schirmer/Mosel

INDEX

Bibliographical references

BOOKSHOP

Thomas Struth. New pictures from paradise
Ingo Hartmann
Hans Rudolf Reust
GERMANY Munchen - 2002
Schirmer/Mosel

BOOKSHOP

Thomas Struth
Mario Codognato
Electa - 2008

Pages 132
Price € 10.00