Thomas Struth at the Museum Folkwang
The exhibition Nature & Politics is showing photographs of highly complex apparatuses and poses questions about the limits of progress.
The Martin Gropius Building in Berlin, the High Museum of Art Atlanta and the Saint Louis Art Museum are the upcoming venues for an exhibition with works by Thomas Struth which is currently showing at the Museum Folkwang in Essen. Struth is one of the world’s most renowned photographers, and his current theme is of global significance. The large-format images in the exhibition spotlight technical progress and its limits. The title is Nature & Politics.
An underwater world in the USA, a chemistry laboratory in Scotland, an apparatus at the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Greifswald: the depicted constructions are highly complex, man-made and enigmatic. Many of them are otherwise never seen by the general public. What are all the cables and switches for? What drives humans who develop such things? And how does this serve society? Struth places these questions centre stage with powerful colours on colossal canvasses.
Düsseldorf School
The artist, who was born in 1954, is well-known for his focus on structures and details which he illuminates intensely. Together with Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer and others, he belongs to the so-called Düsseldorf School. He studied at Düsseldorf Art Academy in the 1970s, at first painting with Gerhard Richter and later photography with Bernd and Hilla Becher. Struth gained recognition with photographs from cities such as Düsseldorf, New York or Lima. Meanwhile, he has shifted his focus to interiors: “I want to go inside the factory to see what the engine room of modernity looks like,” he once told the weekly newspaper Die Zeit.
Nature & Politics until 29 May 2016 at the Museum Folkwang, Essen
