THOMAS STRUTH | HAZIENDA RIO PALPA, PALPA, PERU

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner

“[In Struth’s] ongoing series of photographs of jungles and forests, …the artist confronts the Edenic. His paradise is neither lost nor won—it has no innocence to lose. Rather, pluralized in a series of images, it embodies a phenomenon of viewing: the gaze losing itself in the branches only to be thrown back onto itself. Struth paces the borders between cultures… Faced with a reticent image of undifferentiated foliage, the viewer’s thoughts have nowhere to turn save inward. In these photographs, Struth encounters the limits of a nondiscursive photography that de-emphasizes its specific object through the motif… This approach further highlights his particular, ‘painterly’ manner in the context of contemporary German photography… Paradise has always been the fictive point of departure for a transformed view of the world. Changed, we grow toward ourselves—and each other—out of the picture’s jungle.

(Hans Rudolf Reust, “1000 Words: Thomas Struth,” Artforum, May 2002, p. 151)