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Lot Essay
A monumental vision stretching over two metres in width, Mailänder Dom (innen), Mailand stems from Thomas Struth’s iconic series of works depicting places of worship. Executed in 1998, it represents a virtuosic culmination of the artist’s most significant thematic concerns: cultural pilgrimage, architectural structures and ideological systems. Raised as a Catholic in divided Germany, Struth was fascinated not only by religion’s close connection with art, but also by the overarching power structures that accompanied systems of belief. In the present work, whose sister photograph captures the cathedral’s exterior, this enquiry is expressed in geometric terms, demonstrating the order imposed upon the mass of people by the building’s interior architecture.
Extending the compositional complexity of his Museum Photographs, which juxtaposed moving spectators with static artworks, Struth began to photograph places of worship in 1995, depicting San Zaccaria in Venice, Monreale Cathedral in Palermo (1998), the Buddhist temple Tōdai-Ji in Nara, Japan (1996/99), Notre-Dame de Paris (2000) and the Iglesia de San Francisco in Lima, Peru (2003). His depictions of Christian sites, in particular, stand among his most personal works.
‘I’ve always been very conscious of the formative forces at work on my own personal development’, he explains. ‘I was brought up as a Catholic and was a regular churchgoer until around the age of fourteen, when I began to question the structure of the church … For a visual artist, the gaze is critical. And the gaze has to do with the distance between your own entity and what is in front of you’ (T. Struth, quoted in A. Kruszynski et al (eds.), Thomas Struth. Photographs 1978 – 2010, New York 2010, p. 192).
In the present work, the directional gaze of the congregation and the beams of overhead light draw the eye to the left-hand edge of the composition, where a crowd of priests and choirboys blurs into luminous abstraction. At the same time, the sweeping parallel arrangement of pews, columns and paintings pulls our vision in the opposite direction, fracturing the central perspective that had defined much of Struth’s early oeuvre.
For Struth, the act of looking defines human activity, and is intricately bound to the powers that shape our world. In this respect, his focus on places of worship was the next logical step in a practice that had already explored a number of society’s governing forces – namely city architecture, the family unit, the natural landscape and the museum. Struth would extend his depictions of religious buildings into more secular places of ‘worship’: his photographs of Tien An Men in Beijing (1997) and New York’s Times Square (2000) present similar sites of human congregation, presided over by the spectres of Chairman Mao and the advertising industry respectively. A further conceptual extension of this project may be identified in his 1999 photograph of the giant granite rock formation El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, capturing a gathering of tourists transfixed by its presence. Common to all these works, and the present, is a fascination with the icons, monuments and spaces that – for better or worse – organise our collective gaze.
Extending the compositional complexity of his Museum Photographs, which juxtaposed moving spectators with static artworks, Struth began to photograph places of worship in 1995, depicting San Zaccaria in Venice, Monreale Cathedral in Palermo (1998), the Buddhist temple Tōdai-Ji in Nara, Japan (1996/99), Notre-Dame de Paris (2000) and the Iglesia de San Francisco in Lima, Peru (2003). His depictions of Christian sites, in particular, stand among his most personal works.
‘I’ve always been very conscious of the formative forces at work on my own personal development’, he explains. ‘I was brought up as a Catholic and was a regular churchgoer until around the age of fourteen, when I began to question the structure of the church … For a visual artist, the gaze is critical. And the gaze has to do with the distance between your own entity and what is in front of you’ (T. Struth, quoted in A. Kruszynski et al (eds.), Thomas Struth. Photographs 1978 – 2010, New York 2010, p. 192).
In the present work, the directional gaze of the congregation and the beams of overhead light draw the eye to the left-hand edge of the composition, where a crowd of priests and choirboys blurs into luminous abstraction. At the same time, the sweeping parallel arrangement of pews, columns and paintings pulls our vision in the opposite direction, fracturing the central perspective that had defined much of Struth’s early oeuvre.
For Struth, the act of looking defines human activity, and is intricately bound to the powers that shape our world. In this respect, his focus on places of worship was the next logical step in a practice that had already explored a number of society’s governing forces – namely city architecture, the family unit, the natural landscape and the museum. Struth would extend his depictions of religious buildings into more secular places of ‘worship’: his photographs of Tien An Men in Beijing (1997) and New York’s Times Square (2000) present similar sites of human congregation, presided over by the spectres of Chairman Mao and the advertising industry respectively. A further conceptual extension of this project may be identified in his 1999 photograph of the giant granite rock formation El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, capturing a gathering of tourists transfixed by its presence. Common to all these works, and the present, is a fascination with the icons, monuments and spaces that – for better or worse – organise our collective gaze.