February 2003 - Nr. 2
Thomas Struth Exhibition Opens in New York
TWIG - A major retrospective of works by German photographer Thomas Struth opened Tuesday (February 4) at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The 90-piece exhibition traces Struth’s career from his early black-and-white images of urban Europe and America to his recent, massively scaled, lush color landscapes, shot in Asia, Australia and South America. The show also highlights works from the artist’s arresting Museum Photographs series, in which scenes of people visiting museums and cultural monuments illustrate the tension between present and past. Throughout the exhibition, which runs through May 18, a series of video portraits composed by Struth will be projected in the museum’s Great Hall, marking the first time in history the work of a living artist has been featured there. In an unusual extension of the show, one-minute excerpts from the series will also appear on a vast video screen in Times Square, the last minute of most hours between 6:00 am and 1:00 am.
Born in Düsseldorf in 1954, Struth studied photography with Bernd and Hilla Becher, who helped shape the work of an entire generation of German photographers, including Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky and Candida Hofer. In the late 1970s, Struth began photographing the streets of his native city, using the camera to catalogue textures and shapes and create an impression of his subject through a series of varied but comparable views. The artist later moved on to other cities in Europe, the United States and Asia, and began to shoot black-and-white portraits of individuals and families, compositions that emerged after long discussions with the subjects about how they wished to appear. More recently, he has moved away from the human and human-made to photograph a series of forest and jungle scenes labeled Paradise, an ironic commentary on the contrast between modernity and ideas of a lost primeval state. Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello calls Struth "a key figure in not only bringing photography into the mainstream of contemporary art, but also imbuing his medium with the scale and ambition of great art from the past."
The exhibit also appeared at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and will be shown from June 28 to September 28 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. In New York, it will be accompanied by a concert and film series featuring works selected by Struth, as well as a panel discussion with the artist on February 18 at Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes. More information on the exhibit can be found at www.metmuseum.org.
