The German artist Thomas Struth is renowned for his practice of creating singular images, each within strictly segregated subject fields: architecture, portraiture, landscape and, most recently, sites of technological and scientific research.
Nature & Politics explores in depth diverse strands of Struth’s enquiry, whilst also elaborating the interstices between them, to present a significant monograph of the artist’s work.
In recent years technology and the constructed landscape have become overarching subjects for Struth. Photographing at sites of techno-industrial and scientific research, including physics institutes, pharmaceutical plants, space stations, dockyards, nuclear facilities and operating theatres – he has focused on machines which are some of the transformative instruments of our contemporary world, and edifices of technological production where the heights of human knowledge are enacted, debated and advanced. These works explore the aesthetics of innovation and experimentation through the recording of structural complexities and allude to the hidden structures of control, power and influence exerted by advanced technologies.
Struth seeks, in his own words, “to open the doors to what our minds have materialised and transformed into sculpture and to scrutinise what our contemporary world creates in places which are not accessible to most people.” His images penetrate and report on the material spaces of the human imagination, and they are born from an accelerated moment when technology and the image industry have brought physical reality and the imagination closer together.
TOURING EXHIBITION
Nature & Politics
Thomas Struth
• From March 4th to May 28th, 2016
Museum Folkwang
Museumsplatz 1
45128 Essen
Germany
https://www.museum-folkwang.de
• From June 11th to September 18th, 2016
Martin-Gropius Bau
Berliner Festspiele
Schaperstraße 24
10719 Berlin
Berlin
Germany
http://www.berlinerfestspiele.de
• Fall 2016
High Museum
1280 Peachtree Street
N.E. Atlanta, GA 30309
United States
https://www.high.org
• St Louis Art Museum
1 Fine Arts Dr, St. Louis
MO 63110, United States
http://www.slam.org
BOOK
Nature & Politics
Thomas Struth
Texts by Tobia Bezzola, Dirk Baecker and D. Graham Burnett
MACK
214 pages
95 colour plates
24 cm x 35 cm
ISBN 9781910164471
€45.00 £40.00 $55.00
http://mackbooks.co.uk
http://www.thomasstruth32.com
