Marian Goodman Gallery is delighted to participate in the Art Show, held at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. 

We are especially pleased to dedicate our booth to the photography of German artist, Thomas Struth. The selection of work presented will include street scenes from New York in the 1970s, five of which will be on view for the very first time. Struth visited New York in the late 70s through an inaugural scholarship from the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. He stayed for nine months, capturing street scenes from a central perspective. His black-and-white photographs depict an essential and unobtrusive side of the city, with no inhabitants, with distinct buildings and some parked cars, providing a sense of depth perception as the roads seemingly stretch for miles. Struth brings the city to the viewer with his intensely-focused images, coaxing the textures and complexities of urban architecture to an intimate proximity that is almost three-dimensional in nature. 

“I was interested in the possibility of the photographic image revealing the different character or the ‘sound’ of the place,” Thomas Struth said in his monograph from 2010. “I learned that certain areas of the city have an emblematic character; they express the city’s structure. How can the atmosphere of one place be so different from another, and why? This question has always been important to me. Who has the responsibility for the way a city is? The urban structure is an accretion of so many decisions.” 

The booth will also include a number of street scenes Struth took while visiting Peru in 2003, where he was similarly drawn to its urban areas, but for different reasons. He recalls wanting to “work with distance, to keep an open and innocent gaze, to work without any personal narrative or experience of the city.” He was struck by the anonymity of the architecture, the complete lack of any visible historical continuity and identity in a conurbation shaped by the rupture of colonialism and its consequences. 

The universal point of view, predominant in his early black-and-white work, has also carried through to each subsequent series, including the more recent technology and industrial works. An example of this, “GRACE-Follow-On Bottom View, IABG, Ottobrunn,” which provides a glimpse of Struth’s fascination in capturing the backdrops of our modern-day technological and cultural reality, will also be on view at the Art Show.