Collection Online as of October 4, 2023
San Zaccaria, Venice
Thomas Struth
(German, b. 1954)
Chromogenic print face-mounted to acrylic
Image: 182 x 230.5 cm (71 5/8 x 90 3/4 in.)
Louis D. Kacalieff, M.D. Fund 1996.13
© Thomas Struth
Impression: 5
Location
not on view
Description
In 1989, Thomas Struth began a remarkable series of large-scale color photographs of people visiting art museums around the world. He recorded people looking at art—a common, yet difficult-to-describe activity that combines aesthetics, education, and entertainment. Taken in the summer of 1995 in Venice, on a four-day shoot that produced 60 negatives, this immense photograph depicts the interior of the church of San Zaccaria (originally designed by Antonio di Marco Gambello in the Gothic style and completed in the later 15th century by Maruo Coducci in the Renaissance style). Struth set up his camera at eye level, focusing directly on Giovanni Bellini's magnificent altarpiece of 1505, "The Virgin and Child with Saints Peter, Catherine, Lucy, and Jerome." He then captured on film the poses and attitudes of visitors contemplating the artistic embellishments of a building intended not as a museum, but as a place of worship.
Thomas Struth
Thomas Struth German, 1954- Thomas Struth (born in Geldern) relies on the optical precision and detailed resolution of photography to explore social and psychological aspects of the contemporary urban metropolis. A student of Gerhard Richter and Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, Struth inherited from his instructors a similar conceptual approach. His work of the early 1980s, austere black-and-white images of buildings and city streets devoid of human activity, suggests urban malaise and, at the same time, a sense of soulful detachment from the environment. For his later works, Struth moved into color and greatly increased the scale of his photographs, invoking a more participatory relationship between image and viewer. His scenes expanded to include people interacting in public spaces such as museums and churches, or posed in family portraits. Struth has exhibited internationally, with one-person shows at the Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art (1987), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1992), the Saint Louis Art Museum (1993), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1994), and the Kunstmuseum, Bonn (1995). His monographs include Thomas Struth, Unbewusste Orte/Unconscious Places (1987), Thomas Struth (1989), Thomas Struth Photographs (1990), Thomas Struth (1991), Thomas Struth: Portraits (1992), Thomas Struth, Museum Photographs (1993), and Thomas Struth: Strangers and Friends: Photographs 1986-1992 (1994). He lives in Düsseldorf. A.W.