Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth (Geldern, Germany 1954) is regarded as one of the world’s foremost contemporary artists. From 1973 to 1980, Struth studied at the State Academy of Art in Düsseldorf. In 1977 he was the first student to receive a scholarship from the Düsseldorf Academy to live and work in New York. There he created a series of black-and-white urban landscapes, which he showed in his first solo exhibition at P.S.1, New York, in 1978. In the mid-1980s, he started on a series of portraits of individuals and families illustrating his vision of photography as a science-derived tool for psychological investigation. This continuing work examines the personal and cultural dynamics that condition our self-image, exploring how this self-image will influence our individual and collective identities. From 1989 to 2005, Struth developed his best-known series, the Museum Photographs , in which he captures individuals and crowds looking at iconic works of Western art in the great museums of the world. Over the last fifteen years, Struth has steadily expanded his repertoire with other themes. These include New Pictures from Paradise (1998–2007), gathering places for religious believers or tourists (from 1998), and, beginning in 2007, images from the fields of science and research, industrial production and technology, which show how our faith in progress can be visually represented as a process of group dynamics.