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Thomas Struth's early photographs follow the typological process of Bernd and Hilla Becher, his early teachers, though he focuses his camera on unpopulated urban landscapes rather than industrial remains. In 1989, he began to systematically photograph visitors to the major European museums in front of well-known historical paintings. In the Louvre, Struth shot groups sitting on the floor in front of David's rigid neoclassical canvases, or casual visitors before Gericault's Raft of the Medusa. Viewers' bodies in Art Institute of Chicago 1 (1990) block our access to a well-known canvas by Seurat, while their gazes lead us into the picture within the picture. Their casual poses, in contrast to the carefully constructed body language of the painting, makes us conscious of our own positions as viewers. As Hans Belting explains, "we don't usually go to an exhibition to look at the people there, especially not to observe people who are merely looking at pictures--a situation in which we soon become entangled in a kind of tautology of their gaze being within our gaze. We then discover in this labyrinth of perception yet a third site--not the museum where the paintings are hanging, but the place they depict" (H. Belting, Thomas Struth: Museum Photographs, exh. cat., Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 1993, p. 6).
Struth's formally sophisticated compositions trap unsuspecting viewers between the camera and the paintings they have come to see. The large format of his prints, many of which are over six feet wide, stands in stark contrast to the size of the paintings depicted; this stark contrast brings the two mediums into dramatic dialogue.
Beginning in 1995, Struth started to expand the boundaries of his practice to shoot pictures of visitors to churches, with works such as San Zaccaria, Chiesa dei Frari, Venice, and Basilica de Montreale, Palermo. In Montreale (1998) Struth captures tourists visiting a famous twelfth century cathedral outside Palermo, Sicily. A tour group sits scattered in the foreground, watching a guide who gestures toward the mosaics on the wall, while the static image of Jesus Christ in the church's apse contrasts with the brightly colored T-shirts of the visitors. In this way, Montreale insistently brings the art depicted into collusion with Struth's own artistry. His skillful composition is structured by architecture much as the architecture of the church structures the mosaics and controls the experience of its visitors.
California Valley I, California is a striking image from a series of landscape photographs shot in the western United States in 1999. In these pictures, Struth casts his unsentimental eye on the relationship between nature and human settlement. This photograph frames the gridded patterns of human intervention between heavily shaded mountains in the foreground and the dark silhouette of the next range on the horizon in the background. The rich tonalities of the ground against the dark mountains and blue sky reinforce the sublimity of nature in the face of civilization. Charles Wylie describes the effect of Struth's transcendent photographs of the natural world within the gallery space: "Bringing into the gallery images of forests that have remained for the most part undisturbed, Struth comes closest to the Romantic idea of nature--possessing power and mystery, it is controlled by an order impossible for us to understand with our industrialized eye" (C. Wylie, "A History of Now: The Art of Thomas Struth," Thomas Struth: 1977-2002, exh. cat., The Dallas Museum of Art, 2002, p. 153).
THOMAS STRUTH (b. 1954)
Basilica de Montreale, Palermo
Details
THOMAS STRUTH (b. 1954)
Basilica de Montreale, Palermo
signed 'Thomas Struth' (on a paper label affixed to the reverse) and numbered '8/10' (on the reverse)
color coupler print
73 3/8 x 91 1/8 in. (186.5 x 231.5 cm.)
Executed in 1998. This work is number eight from an edition of ten.
Basilica de Montreale, Palermo
signed 'Thomas Struth' (on a paper label affixed to the reverse) and numbered '8/10' (on the reverse)
color coupler print
73 3/8 x 91 1/8 in. (186.5 x 231.5 cm.)
Executed in 1998. This work is number eight from an edition of ten.
Provenance
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Literature
J. Rothfus & E. Carpenter, Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collection, p. 537 (illustrated).