Struth Is Beauty

FANFAIR

PHOTOGRAPHER THOMAS STRUTH CAPTURES MYSTERY

homas Struth is a photographic philosopher. His images are technically flawless photographic paintings, referencing and synthesizing the histories of art and culture. The artist's first major United States retrospective, featuring 100 works spanning the last 25 years, opens this month at the Dallas Museum of Art. "What is amazing about Struth is that he can turn to each of the genres that photography has been known for and create a contemporary object that has classical formal appeal but yet really talks about our world today," says Dallas curator Charles Wylie.

Struth was a student of Bernd and Hilla Beefier's and Gerhard Richter's at Dusseldorf's Kunstakademie, the same artistic incubator that spawned Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Candida Hofer. Coolly dispassionate, imbued with a power more often associated with old-master paintings, Struth's large-scale portraits of urban exteriors, jungle paradises, and tourists standing before works of art in museums are a beautiful catalogue of the way we live now. There is an absence of hierarchy, a wide-open eye which in reality would be overwhelming but here encourages us to linger, to be aware, to look carefully. "If is a mirror to what a viewer is doing while they're looking at the work in a museum," says Wylie. "It doubles back and brings about this idea of awareness on the part of the viewer—What am I looking at now? Am I in a Struth photograph?"

A. M. HOMES