Andreas Gursky: Photographs

by Andreas Gursky

In his large-format colour photos Gursky usually portrays vast panoramic "complete" townscapes, "endless horizons", huge factory halls and packed rooms, frequently from a bird’s eye view, always from a great distance. The people in these tableaux, reminiscent of the landscape paintings of romanticism in terms of composition and lighting, are reduced to the size of tiny decorative figures, whose "individuality" seems to drown in the "ornamentation of the masses." Devoid of any trace of reproach or intention to psychologize, Gursky’s portraits of exteriors and interiors capturing scenes of work and leisure are subtle descriptions of the condition of our society. Our book, the first major monograph of Gursky’s photographic work since 1984, is now available again.

Genres: Art

144 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2004

About the author

Andreas Gursky is a German artist known for his large-scale digitally manipulated images. Similar in scope to early 19th-century landscape paintings, Gursky’s photographs capture built and natural environments on a grand scale. Often taken from a lofted vantage point, the artist latter splices together multiple images of the same scene. This dizzying repetition of elements creates a surreal monumentality, as seen in his 99 Cent (1999). “In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical,” he mused. “Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something.”

Born January 15, 1955 in Leipzig, East Germany, he studied alongside fellow student Thomas Ruff under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1980s. The Becher’s penchant for systematic documentation as a conceptual framework had a profound impact on Gursky’s photography. Emerging in the 1990s, the artist established himself as an important figure in contemporary German art, going on to be the subject of retrospectives at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1998 and in 2001 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. On November 8, 2011, his photograph Rhein II sold at Christie's New York for $4.3 million, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold. Today, Gursky’s works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate Modern in London. He lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Reviews

[Owlseyes]

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/2017...

[C.]

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I saw the exhibition yesterday and it was excellent, though not life-changing. Massive full-colour photographs present us with a view of the world that we seldom see from the inside of our little bubbles of self-absorption. Consumerism, construction, urban decay. Oh my. His photographs work on the level of abstract painting, with line, colour, shape being all-important. But go up close and you can see the ant-like people, the lines on the roads, the reflections on those weird ball-like things. And you see that though we are so much larger than life, but underneath that, we are so small.

In other words, I want more.