Thomas Struth brings Hyperrealism to Marian Goodman Gallery

Thomas Struth’s recent explorations of the natural and high-tech worlds are on display in a show of work that has not been previously exhibited in the United States.  

Images of Siemens’ High Voltage Testing Laboratory in Berlin and the Johnson Space Center in Houston continue Struth’s project photographing scientific research spaces. Struth has said that he seeks “to open the doors to what our mind has materialized and transformed into sculpture and to scrutinize what our contemporary world creates in places which are not accessible to most people.” At first, these images read as exposing covert operations, but their large scale makes them difficult to visually decode: are we seeing blown-up versions of a child’s playset or an actual place? Disclosure is not the only motive.  

Hyper-real and in a vibrant, Lego-set palette, the images advertise themselves as art, but they also reference the earliest industrial photographs that monumentalized the wonders of machine-age civilization. Struth’s images seem uneasy with the idea of photography as an instrument of progress. There is something autopsical about them, which makes their subjects seem less like objects and more like organisms.