Biography of Thomas Florschuetz
Berlin-based Thomas Florschuetz has risen to become one of Germany’s most acclaimed photographers. His large-scale and intensely detailed photographs are much-prized and highly sought after.
Concerned with fragmenting his subjects, Thomas Florschuetz captures them from unusual angles allowing his photographs to take on abstract and painterly qualities. Light plays a major role and often it is from the perspective of light that Florschuetz’s subjects are exposed. “Light is the most important thing in photography”, he explains, “within a few seconds light can make the same object appear different”.
Thomas Florschuetz first gained recognition for his 1980s work, Early Bodyfigures. In the series he explored his own “vanity” through huge close-ups of various parts of his own body. Immensely powerful, the jarring interactions between the different body parts helped foster a state of uneasiness. Florschuetz’s choice of subject has since expanded to include airplanes, architectural spaces, and flowers. But the powerful visual experience of his early work is retained in the more recent work’s magnified scale. His highly-regarded flower series is more complex than first meets the eye. Despite focusing on the organic form of the flower, their often synthetic appearance stimulates the senses, providing a fascinating ambivalence to the artworks.
Born in 1957 in Sachsen, Germany, Thomas Florschuetz settled in West Berlin in 1988. Early on in his career he was awarded first prize at the Young European Photographers award in Frankfurt in 1987. In 2004 he won the German Critics’ Prize for Fine Arts, and later, in 2007, he became a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts.
Thomas Florschuetz has exhibited all over the world including at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2001 and again in 2011-12, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art in the UK, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.
