Origin: Room XVI – Tapestry Room
Appartamenti Reali
Palazzo Pitti
Struth's work reveals a visual sensitivity that I also hope to reflect. Struth retains the alleged neutrality of the Becher school through his consummate use of photography, rendering his subjects as highly aesthetic artworks, beautifully rich in texture, color, and composition. His stunning, enormous color photographs show museum displays of monumental paintings overlaid with a diverse group of viewers. In the Museum series, his photographs are undeniably concerned with the presence of the audience, their engagement, and attitude in relation to the artworks.
Although Struth photographs in museums around the world, it is his work in Italian museums that is of fundamental interest to me as these pieces raise questions about not only the notion of viewers and viewing, but also the architectural contexts and social conditions of such distinctive museums. The images in Impossible Gaze , however, depart from the social contexts of Struth's audience to focus on the physicality of the Italian museums themselves. This exhibition emphasizes the historic spaces that surround both artworks and viewers, revelling in the “pastness” that is infused in the very stones of the architecture. These places, once privately inhabited by historic figures of Renaissance times, invoke the transient and poetic qualities of Benjamin's aura, that “strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be.” 1 Steeped in such illustrious history, the auras of the museum collections are constructed by these extraordinary locations.
1. Benjamin, 250.
