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Lot Essay
A sprawling, immersive vision of natural chaos, the present workis among the earliest photographs in Thomas Struth’s celebrated series New Pictures from Paradise. Executed in 1998, it belongs to the first group of works in the cycle, depicting the tropical rainforest in Daintree, northeast Australia. Taken at Emmagen Creek, its tangle of branches and foliage borders on painterly abstraction, spiked with patches of sky and fragmented by beams of light. Described by the artist as his ‘most intuitive’ body of work, the series evolved from his pursuit of increasingly complex pictorial structures, inspired by both his Museum Photographs of the early 1990s and his subsequent depictions of China’s bustling cities. Over the next nine years, the project would take him to the Yunnan Province in China, the island of Yakushima in Japan, California, the Bavarian forest in Germany, Brazil, Peru, Hawaii and New Smyrna Beach in Florida. For Struth, the notion of ‘paradise’ has less to do with the works’ subject matter than with the viewer’s experience of looking at them. In their knotted picture planes, all sense of visual hierarchy dissolves, creating instead an open utopia of free-flowing visual information. Though replete with religious and art-historical references – from biblical idylls to Romantic landscape painting to the ‘all-over’ surfaces of Jackson Pollock – the present work is ultimately a conceptual vehicle for reflecting upon the way we process our surroundings.
No longer having to contend with variable, moving crowds of people – a feature of Struth’s work throughout the 1990s – the New Pictures from Paradise adopted a more economical, contemplative approach to their subject matter. His travels throughout Asia were particularly instructive in this regard:
‘My trips to China made me aware of Brice Marden's "Cold Mountain" paintings’, he explains. ‘You can feel the time invested in those canvases. Marden engages in Asian calligraphy but frees the characters of their semantic aspect… I try to constantly be in between spaces and to feel life's breath – the rhythm of inhaling and exhaling, as in tai chi. Every day, I could think of thirty pictures that would have a spectacular effect, but it's not about big ideas. Instead I'm trying to effectively unite the conscious and the unconscious of life and the time I live in and thereby create authentic pictures’ (T. Struth, ‘A Thousand Words’, in Artforum International, Vol. XL No. 9, May 2002, p. 151).
If the New Pictures from Paradise hark back to the dawn of creation in their subject matter, their composition also invokes a primeval idea of vision: a searching, self-reflexive mode of reading visual data, free from overarching structures and principles. ‘Paradise has always been the fictive point of departure for a transformed view of the world’, writes Hans Rudolf Reust. ‘Changed, we grow toward ourselves – and each other – out of the picture’s jungle’ (H. R. Reust, quoted ibid.).
No longer having to contend with variable, moving crowds of people – a feature of Struth’s work throughout the 1990s – the New Pictures from Paradise adopted a more economical, contemplative approach to their subject matter. His travels throughout Asia were particularly instructive in this regard:
‘My trips to China made me aware of Brice Marden's "Cold Mountain" paintings’, he explains. ‘You can feel the time invested in those canvases. Marden engages in Asian calligraphy but frees the characters of their semantic aspect… I try to constantly be in between spaces and to feel life's breath – the rhythm of inhaling and exhaling, as in tai chi. Every day, I could think of thirty pictures that would have a spectacular effect, but it's not about big ideas. Instead I'm trying to effectively unite the conscious and the unconscious of life and the time I live in and thereby create authentic pictures’ (T. Struth, ‘A Thousand Words’, in Artforum International, Vol. XL No. 9, May 2002, p. 151).
If the New Pictures from Paradise hark back to the dawn of creation in their subject matter, their composition also invokes a primeval idea of vision: a searching, self-reflexive mode of reading visual data, free from overarching structures and principles. ‘Paradise has always been the fictive point of departure for a transformed view of the world’, writes Hans Rudolf Reust. ‘Changed, we grow toward ourselves – and each other – out of the picture’s jungle’ (H. R. Reust, quoted ibid.).