Thomas Struth: Winterthur Landscapes

4 Januar - 23 Februar 2025 Vermont

Since the late 1970s, internationally acclaimed German artist Thomas Struth's work has explored the construction of our built and social environments through precise and analytic photographs of individuals and families, landscapes, architecture, and interior spaces of culture and science. This show features a group of Struth’s large-scale color photographs of rural landscapes taken in and around the Winterthur area of Switzerland in the early 1990s.
INFORMATION

Thomas Struth, Forest Road on the Lindberg, Nr. 3, Winterthur, 1992

In 1990 Struth was commissioned to make photographs for patient rooms in the new wing of the Spital am Lindberg, a private hospital in Winterthur, Switzerland. Between 1991 and 1993, he took photographs in the immediate vicinity of Winterthur and the hospital itself. He captured vistas out over the Thur Valley and the Weinland region around Zurich – soft and painterly views of the edges of forests, country lanes, as well as intensely-colored buds, twigs, leaves and withered blooms from an abandoned garden. Struth photographed one large-scale landscape and two individual plants and flowers for each of the thirty-seven patient rooms. The project was called The Dandelion Room. Two close-up photographs of flowers and plants were hung on the wall behind each patient bed, with one large-scale landscape installed on the opposite wall at the foot of each bed. While the flowers could be interpreted as a portrait, metaphor or guardian for the sick person, the landscape connected each patient to the outside world.
Thomas Struth, Group of Trees near Rutschwil, Nr. 25, Winterthur, 1993

Struth recalled that the Dandelion Room project revealed the potential for a different and more painterly approach to photography. In his landscapes – all devoid of people – he experimented with partly out-of-focus or blurred images and with diffused light conditions. Each view is intentionally asymmetrical yet remains balanced. In Group of Trees near Rutschwil, Nr. 25, Winterthur (1993), a swath of bare trees dominates the left side of the photograph as the eye follows the trunks to the curving road. The landscapes are unposed and unidealized.
Thomas Struth, Cornfield, Nr. 22, Winterthur, 1992

Thomas Struth was born in Geldern, near Düsseldorf in 1954 in a divided post war Germany. In 1973, he enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, initially in the painting department under the artist Gerhard Richter. Although first interested in photography as a source for his paintings, Struth eventually transferred out of Richter’s class and into the class of Bernd Becher who began teaching at the Academy in 1976. Together with his wife, Hilla, the Bechers are celebrated for grouping photographs of industrial structures taken across Europe and America into ‘typologies.’ Known as the Düsseldorf School of Photography, a group of artists including Struth, Andreas Gurksy, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, and Thomas Ruff adapted the Bechers’ documentary and serial approach with new technologies and in large-scale color formats, capturing contemporary German life through an unexaggerated lens.
Thomas Struth, Sketch, Löwenzahnzimmer (The Dandelion Room), Winterthur, 1991

Recent comprehensive exhibitions of Struth’s work include the major touring show, Nature & Politics exhibited at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany, the High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; the Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, Texas; the St. Louis Museum of Art, Missouri and the MAST Foundation Bolgna, Italy (2016-2019) as well as Figure Ground which opened at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany and traveled to the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain (2017-2019). Other recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Hilti Art Foundation, Vaduz, Lichtenstein (2019); Aspen Museum of Art, Colorado (2018); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2014); and a major traveling retrospective which traveled from the Museu Serralves, Portugal to the K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland (2010-2012). Struth’s work can be found in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate in London and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others. Struth currently lives and works in Berlin.
Installation Views
Artworks
Artist
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  Thomas Struth
Installation views: Jeffrey Nintzel