Thomas Struth: The Dandelion Room

A central figure of the new wave of German photography that first arrived in the 1970s, Thomas Struth has continued to impact the world of photography with his large-scale museum interiors, portraits, and architectural photography. Struth has emerged as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary art’s critique of the subject and the socio-economic order by creating images that are at once visually arresting and subtly political. This new monograph presents another facet of Struth’s oeuvre, assembling a series of flower photographs produced for a unique project. In 1991, Struth was commissioned to decorate a new hospital in Winterthur, Switzerland. He decided to produce a two flower photographs and a landscape for each of the 37 sickrooms. The flower photographs were to be hung on the wall behind the bed, the landscape on the opposite wall. With this project, Struth hoped to bring the captivating environment of the Winterthur area into the interior space of the hospital, connecting patients to the outside word. The images for the hospital shift between documentary objectivity and painterly qualities of light and shadow. Beautifully reproduced here, these pictures brilliantly and colorfully synthesize a tradition of landscape photography that includes Edward Weston, Walker Evans, and August Sander with the tradition of 19th century flower and landscape painting.