Thomas Florschuetz

Year of birth, place
1957, Zwickau, Germany
Role at the ZKM
in the collection
Biography
Thomas Florschuetz was born in Zwickau, in 1957. In 1987 he was awarded the first prize for new European photography in Frankfurt am Main. In 1988 he moved to Berlin. In 1993 he received a grant enabling him to spend seven months in New York. He lives in Berlin and Paris.

Thomas Florschuetz photographs the human body without, however, taking it as his real subject. His principal interest lies in the compositional aspects of photography. Alongside portraits of his friends, he has largely produced photographic images that are characterized by the use of radical perspectives. Often these images show details of the body surface, only a few centimeters in diameter, of which it is impossible to say to which part of the body they belong. Such photographs are usually printed on a very large scale and exhibited in series. Florschuetz eschews the use of titles to explain the subject of his images and employs them merely to point out the structural qualities predominant in any particular grouping of them: »Staircase«, »Pyramid«, »Diptych«. During the long periods he has spent in Berlin, Paris and New York since 1988, Florschuetz mastered new photographic reproduction techniques, for example C-print or cibachrome. From the late 1980s his images gradually became larger, more colourful and more abstract. In the early 1990s his preferred motif became the human hand, which he photographed back-lit, as a vast, glowing red apparition.
During the last two years, however, the colouring in his work has become paler and Florschuetz's attention has shifted to the surface of legs and feet.

​Individual exhibitions (selection)
 
1987 Museum Folkwang, Essen
1988 Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
1990 Galerie du Jour, Paris
1991 Stadtgalerie, Saarbrücken
1992 »Total inconnu«, Galerie du Jour, Paris; »Belvedere«, Galerie vier und Galerie Nikolaus Sonne, Berlin
1994 »Plexus«, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin
1996 »Vor dem ersten Blick«, Kunstverein Göttingen; »Between Two: Suburbia«, Stills Gallery, Edinburgh; »Between Two: Plexus«, Side Gallery, Sheffield
 
Gruppenausstellungen (Auswahl)
 
1987 »Preis für junge europäische Fotografie«, Kunstverein, Frankfurt/M
1989 »New Photography - V«, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, »Das Medium der Fotografie ist berechtigt Denkanstöße zu geben«, Kunstverein, Hamburg
1990 »The Big Picture«, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
1991 »Bremer Kunstpreis '91«, Kunsthalle Bremen
1992 »Interface«, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
1993 »Das Bild des Körpers«, Kunstverein, Frankfurt/M; »Elective Affinities«, Tate Gallery Liverpool
1994 »Le Shuttle«, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; »Dorothea von Stetten-Kunstpreis«, Bonn
1995 »Urbane Legenden - Berlin«, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

[David Richardt, 1997]