Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth: Making Time
April 4 - 28, 2007
Opening Reception: Wednesday, April 4, 6-8pm

Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Thomas Struth, which will be on view from April 4th through 28th.

The exhibition "Making Time" will include two new series of photographs taken in Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid and the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg which will be on view in the North and South Galleries. 

The Museo del Prado series, a selection of which is installed alongside the permanent collection through May 6th at The Prado, Madrid, presents portraits of an audience in everyday relationship to its past in a unique collaboration between a contemporary artist and this historic museum. The Hermitage series, following on the Audience pictures of 2004, also provides a portrait of people in our own time, presenting a panorama of crowds beholding a single masterpiece. Both have antecedents in Struth's early street, family portraits, and architectural photographs, as well as in the museum pictures which, since 1989, have portrayed the daily life of works of art within the museum space and their relationship with the visitors who "comfortably circulate around the imposing gallery…'as if it were their living room.'" 

"My own work is about different situations in which people find themselves. About streets as public space, where specific and collective attitudes affect us every day, where architecture represents society and culture as the dynamic of the group. About private people in front of the camera and the photographer: how individual characters represent themselves; what can be deduced from them. About families and couples: what their relations, their roles, their history might be; what the encounter between the artist and those portrayed was like on this very day when the photograph was made." 
- Thomas Struth 

"Thomas Struth: Making Time" , currently on view at Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, includes eight of Struth's earlier museum pictures installed in the Villanueva building of the Museo del Prado as well as six from the new Prado series. The works have been distributed within the celebrated galleries, alongside the permanent collection and placed in a direct dialogue with the historic masterworks of the museum. The museum pictures include Struth's Self Portrait of Giles Robertson; Durer's Self Portrait, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; Galleria dell Accademia I, Venice; and Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, photographed while at the Tokyo National Museum. The new works, Prado 8-1 – 8-5, Hermitage 1-7, and works from the Audience series will be on view in Rafael Moneo's new wing of the museum, which will be inaugurated to the public at the end of April and on view between April 27th and May 6th 2007. 

"Being close to this essentially private painting is something like going back to one's emotional home'…. It means establishing an urgent relationship with the passage of events, with the existence Struth is asking himself about from his camera lens. Because deep down, a museum is a circumstantial stage, a place like any other that the artist doesn't perceive with its connotation: there, he offers a straightforward view of the procession of people, those that gradually gain more presence in [his] work. … This parade of types... are new and concrete inhabitants of the metropolis. In Struth's museum, a historical line is drawn that transcends all those who live in the instant: that, too, is existence." 
-Estrella de Diego, "In the Meantime: Struth's Visit to the Prado Museum," published in Thomas Struth: Making Time, Feb-March 2007, Madrid 

Thomas Struth was born in 1954 in Geldern, Germany and now lives in Dusseldorf. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts Dusseldorf, 1973-1980. In 1978 he was the first artist in residence at P.S. 1 Studios, Long Island City. From 1993-96 he was the first Professor of Photography at the newly founded Hochschule fur Gestaltung, Karlsruhe. He was awarded the Spectrum International Photography Prize, Stiftung Niedersachsen, Germany in 1997-98. 

Recent solo exhibitions, in addition to the one at the Prado, include one man shows at Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru (2005); Museum für Fotografie, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, and cacp Musee d'art contemporain, Bordeaux (2004). In 2002-2003 a U.S. retrospective exhibition toured from the Dallas Museum of Art, to MoCA, Los Angeles, to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the MCA, Chicago. Recent group exhibitions include: The Eighties: A Topology of Sense, Museu Serralves, Porto, and Spectacular City: Photographing the Future, NRW Forum, Dusseldorf. Struth's work will be included in upcoming group exhibitions "Gartenlust" at Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna thru June 24th; Der Hinmel auf Erden, Lenbachaus, Munich through July 8th; and Kunst zu Sammeln, Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf through July 22nd. 

Please join us at the opening reception for the artist on Wednesday, April 4th from 6-8 p.m.