Ten years ago Struth accepted a commission to decorate the walls of a hospital in Winterthur, Switzerland. Over the next two years, the artist photographed the surrounding rural landscape and flowers in the hospital's lush gardens. In each of the patients' rooms, he placed a small flower study and a large landscape at the head and foot of each bed, respectively. Through conceiving and creating photographs specifically for a site of recovery and rehabilitation, Struth made explicit the conceptual framework underlying all his work: the therapeutic belief that images can facilitate the viewer's active reconfiguration of the relationship between one's own irreducible being and the givens of circumstance.
