Thomas Struth | Galerie Max Hetzler | 25.04.-21.06.2025

Galerie Max Hetzler presents a solo exhibition of works by Thomas Struth at Potsdamer Straße 77-87 in Berlin. This exhibition offers visitors a new and, at times, surprising insight into Struth’s oeuvre over the past four decades.

Thomas Struth’s work is characterised by his long-term and careful pursuit of themes that revolve, in various guises, around the relationship between people and their environment. His photographs, which harmonise forms of documentation and contemplation, capture today’s society through images of cultural spaces, as well as the natural world, portraiture, and places of industrial and technological innovation.

Thomas Struth, Paradise 28, Peru 2005, 2005, inkjet print, 222 x 171.8 cm. (framed) 

At the start of the exhibition, one of Struth’s most recent works, The Big Island, Hawaii 2024, draws viewers into the depths of densely wooded Hawaiian mountains. On the gallery’s far wall, Semi Submersible Rig, DSME Shipyard, Geoje Island 2007 depicts an industrial megastructure on the southern coast of South Korea. Its monumental size and four mighty pillars are emphasised by the perspective of the steel colossus, which stretches up to the upper edge of the picture.

The earliest portraits in the exhibition, taken in the 1980s, constitute some of the artist’s most rarely seen works. Struth has long been interested in the depiction of people, as exemplified in his celebrated Family Portraits, which convey the intricacies of family dynamics. By contrast, the portraits in this exhibition focus on the relationship between subject and photographer. They seek to capture the presence of the individual and thus make visible an incomprehensible yet universally recognisable facet of humanity.

Mailänder Dom, Fassade, 1998, inkjet print, 175.4 x 221.6 cm (framed)

Since the late 1980s, Struth has also explored the special relationship people have with works of art and the places that house them. His Museum Photographs depict viewers confronting their own civilisation across the ages. In 2023, the artist spent several days at The Metropolitan Museum in New York, where he photographed visitors in front of Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, 1867–1868, and Edgar Dégas’ The Bellelli Family, 1858–1867. In the resulting diptych, titled The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2023, Struth alludes to a historic connection between the two artists: following his death, Manet’s family cut up his painting to sell it in parts; the surviving fragments were later acquired by Degas and were eventually reassembled in the late 1970s. Adding further layers to the work, Struth captures present-day museum visitors as they photograph the painting with their luminous smartphones. Spaces, times, cultures, and attitudes are layered and combined, mediated via the artworks and their audience, and the viewer of the photograph.

The New Pictures from Paradise represented in this exhibition date from the early 2000s, the decade that saw a heightened awareness of the fragility and importance of the natural world. In these photographs, Struth aims to depict a diversity so dense that individual components are no longer identifiable to the human eye, and an impression of inaccessibility prevails instead.

A similar experience is at play in Struth’s Nature & Politics photographs, initiated in 2007. In the present exhibition, these are represented through scenes from aerospace technology and nuclear fusion test centres. In Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Periphery, Max Planck IPP, Garching, Germany, 2009, a bewildering tangle of colour-coded wires conveys the unfathomable reality of advanced technology to the untrained eye. Its promise of future innovation remains abstract and intangible.

Thomas Struth, Stellarator Wendelstein 7-X Detail, Max Planck IPP, Greifswald, 2009, inkjet print, 152.5 x 202.5 cm., (framed)

Thomas Struth (b. 1954) lives and works in Berlin. Struth has exhibited his work at Galerie Max Hetzler on a regular basis since 1987. Major retrospectives were held at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2019) and the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017). In 2016, his comprehensive solo exhibition Nature & Politics opened at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, before being presented at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, the High Museum, Atlanta, the Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, and finally the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri. Other major solo exhibitions have taken place at international institutions, including MAST Foundation, Bologna (2019); Aspen Art Museum (2018); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2014 and 2003); Kunsthaus Zürich; Museu Serralves, Porto; and K20, Düsseldorf (all 2011); Museo del Prado, Madrid (2007); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2003); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Dallas Museum of Art (2002).