Thomas Struth

This exhibition, organized by Mario Codognato, constitutes Thomas Struth’s first retrospective in an Italian museum. The show’s clean and rigorous design successfully conveys the creative path of one of the most important representatives of the Düsseldorf school. The presentation begins with the early black-and-white architectural photographs taken in Naples in the late 1970s, which are reminiscent of the “objective” and documentary photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and then moves on to urban landscapes of various cities. These are all serene images; Naples, for example, is presented without humans and as both vertical and oriented toward its hill. In the series “Family Portraits,” 1996–2005—monumental photographic tableaux that investigate the complex dynamics of interfamilial relationships—Struth plays with the theatrical and introspective potential of old-master painting. Then there are his celebrated “Museum Photographs,” 1989–2005, with which he inaugurates a critical discourse on the role of art and its enjoyment. Focusing his lens on the heterogeneous public filling museum halls, the artist here connects work, public, and museum in a refined exercise in voyeurism that not only calls into question the relationship between painting and photography but also presents an idea—in line with contemporary museographic theories, like those of Hans Belting—about the transformation of the role of the museum from a place of reflection to a space of sensation. Finally, works from the series “Metropolises,” 1998–2003, depict the great modern megalopolises that make up the diverse faces of globalization in all their colors, lights, and forms, while the “Paradises,” 1998–2005, offer views of rain forests: almost impenetrable abstractions of an Eden forever lost, which lead the viewer to reflect on the changes man is inflicting on nature.