1st Image - Andreas Gursky, Copan, 2002, Chromogenic print
2nd Image - Andreas Gursky, "Atlanta", 1996
3rd Image - Andreas Gursky, Spectacular City, Düsseldorf, 2007
Gursky's May Day V (2006), at Matthew Marks.
(Photo: Andreas Gursky/Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery)
(Photo: Andreas Gursky/Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery)
Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzip in 1955 however he grew up in Dusseldorf and was the son of a commercial photographer. During the early 1980’s, at Germany’s State Art Academy, the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, where Andreas Gurksy received tough influence and training from his teachers such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, a photographic group known for their individual, cool way of thoroughly labeling industrial machinery and architecture. A comparable way may be initiated in Gursky's careful approach to his own, moving towards larger-scale photography. Further famous influences are the British landscape photographer John Davies, whose well detailed high advantage tip descriptions had a strong result on the level of photographs when Gursky was then producing, and to a minor amount the American photographer Joel Sternfeld.
Gursky did not digitally influence his images. In the years since 1990s, Gursky has been honest about his confidence on computers to edit and enhance his pictures, creating an art of spaces larger than the subjects photographed. It had been described in The New York magazine, the critic Peter Schjeldahl called these pictures "vast," "splashy," "entertaining," and "literally unbelievable." In the same publication, critic Calvin Tomkins described Gursky as one of the "two masters" of the "Düsseldorf" school.
In 2001, Tomkins described the experience of confronting one of Gursky's large works: "The first time I saw photographs by Andreas Gursky... I had the disorienting (confused, lost) feeling that something was happening—happening to me, I suppose, although it felt more generalized than that. Gursky's huge, panoramic colour prints—some of them up to six feet high by ten feet long—had the presence, the formal power, and in several cases the royal atmosphere of nineteenth-century landscape paintings, without losing any of their thoroughly detailed closeness as photographs. Their subject matter was the contemporary world, seen neutrally and from a distance."
Visually, Gursky is anxious to large, unknown, man-made spaces—high-rise appearances at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, the interiors of big box retailers (See his print 99 Cent II Diptychon). In a 2001 retrospective, New York's Museum of Modern Art called the artist's work, "a sophisticated art of unembellished observation. It is thanks to the artfulness of Gursky's fictions that we recognize his world as our own." Gursky’s style is enigmatic and deadpan. There is little to no explanation or manipulation on the works. His photography is straightforward.
Gursky seems to have deliberately taken the photo to look like it was taken in a moment of time, like everything has stopped. Andreas Gursky pictures really are becoming increasingly formal and abstract. A visual structure appears to dominate the real events shown in his pictures. I get the better of the real situation to my artistic concept of the picture. Apart from the constantly recurring elements I have already mentioned, another aspect occurs to me which explains the way his pictures function. We never notice random/ chance details in his work. On a formal level, countless reliable micro and macrostructures are woven together, determined by an overall clerical opinion. A closed microcosm which, thanks to his detachment attitude towards his subject, allows the viewer to recognize the turning point that holds the system together. Of course, there are enough reasons to justify such proper, representation of reality. If we talk about his interest in nature, he’d explain his complete concept of nature. I am perhaps more interested in the nature of things in general - again and again, the term "aggregate state"/ total situation, comes to mind when he describes the existential state of things.
I believe that there's also a certain form of abstraction in his early landscapes: for example, it often shows human figures from behind and thus the landscape is observed through a second lens. I don't name the activities of the human figures specifically and hence do not question what they do in general. The camera's enormous distance from these figures means that they become de-individualized. So Andreas was never interested in the individual, but in the human species and its environment.
Paradoxically, this view of the Rhine cannot be obtained in situ, a fictitious construction was required to provide an accurate image of a modern river. The same thing happened when I visited over 70 world-famous industrial companies. Most of them had a socio-romantic air I hadn't expected. I was looking for visual proof of what I thought would be antiseptic industrial zones. If these companies had been systematically documented one would have had the feeling one was back in the days of the Industrial Revolution. After this experience I realized that photography is no longer credible, and therefore found it that much easier to legitimize digital picture processing.
Gursky did not digitally influence his images. In the years since 1990s, Gursky has been honest about his confidence on computers to edit and enhance his pictures, creating an art of spaces larger than the subjects photographed. It had been described in The New York magazine, the critic Peter Schjeldahl called these pictures "vast," "splashy," "entertaining," and "literally unbelievable." In the same publication, critic Calvin Tomkins described Gursky as one of the "two masters" of the "Düsseldorf" school.
In 2001, Tomkins described the experience of confronting one of Gursky's large works: "The first time I saw photographs by Andreas Gursky... I had the disorienting (confused, lost) feeling that something was happening—happening to me, I suppose, although it felt more generalized than that. Gursky's huge, panoramic colour prints—some of them up to six feet high by ten feet long—had the presence, the formal power, and in several cases the royal atmosphere of nineteenth-century landscape paintings, without losing any of their thoroughly detailed closeness as photographs. Their subject matter was the contemporary world, seen neutrally and from a distance."
Visually, Gursky is anxious to large, unknown, man-made spaces—high-rise appearances at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, the interiors of big box retailers (See his print 99 Cent II Diptychon). In a 2001 retrospective, New York's Museum of Modern Art called the artist's work, "a sophisticated art of unembellished observation. It is thanks to the artfulness of Gursky's fictions that we recognize his world as our own." Gursky’s style is enigmatic and deadpan. There is little to no explanation or manipulation on the works. His photography is straightforward.
Gursky seems to have deliberately taken the photo to look like it was taken in a moment of time, like everything has stopped. Andreas Gursky pictures really are becoming increasingly formal and abstract. A visual structure appears to dominate the real events shown in his pictures. I get the better of the real situation to my artistic concept of the picture. Apart from the constantly recurring elements I have already mentioned, another aspect occurs to me which explains the way his pictures function. We never notice random/ chance details in his work. On a formal level, countless reliable micro and macrostructures are woven together, determined by an overall clerical opinion. A closed microcosm which, thanks to his detachment attitude towards his subject, allows the viewer to recognize the turning point that holds the system together. Of course, there are enough reasons to justify such proper, representation of reality. If we talk about his interest in nature, he’d explain his complete concept of nature. I am perhaps more interested in the nature of things in general - again and again, the term "aggregate state"/ total situation, comes to mind when he describes the existential state of things.
I believe that there's also a certain form of abstraction in his early landscapes: for example, it often shows human figures from behind and thus the landscape is observed through a second lens. I don't name the activities of the human figures specifically and hence do not question what they do in general. The camera's enormous distance from these figures means that they become de-individualized. So Andreas was never interested in the individual, but in the human species and its environment.
Paradoxically, this view of the Rhine cannot be obtained in situ, a fictitious construction was required to provide an accurate image of a modern river. The same thing happened when I visited over 70 world-famous industrial companies. Most of them had a socio-romantic air I hadn't expected. I was looking for visual proof of what I thought would be antiseptic industrial zones. If these companies had been systematically documented one would have had the feeling one was back in the days of the Industrial Revolution. After this experience I realized that photography is no longer credible, and therefore found it that much easier to legitimize digital picture processing.
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