Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1955 and studied at the Folkwangschule Essen and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he earned his degree as a master-class student under Professor Bernd Becher. Since the late 1980s, the work of Andreas Gursky was exhibited in numerous solo and group shows. In 2001, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized the first retrospective of Andreas Gursky, which then toured to the Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. Currently, his second retrospective is on view at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. His works are included in many international institutional and private collections. For this exhibition in London, Andreas Gursky is showing works from the last five years. With his large-scale photographs he portrays the 21st century as the age of a globalised, capitalistic society and addresses its phenomena such as mass events, stock markets or futuristic architectures. He also continues to devote himself to classical subjects such as landscape.
The work can be composed out of a single shot or out of a number of shots put together using digital technology. The artist proceeds like a painter: he does not remain at the capture of a moment, but creates a composition out of a multiple number of shots. In this manner, images are being created which go beyond the moment and at the same time still show specific situations. For example, the view on the Formula 1 race-track in Bahrain might seem like a courageous abstract composition by the artist but is in fact a minimally manipulated shot of the car race in the desert state, where, on a closer view, some race cars can be deciphered. In this way, Bahrain I is landscape photography. It illuminates the phenomena of the Formula 1 and at the same time seems like an expressive painting. In his work, Andreas Gursky compiles the continuity and objectivity of the medium in the tradition of Bernd and Hilla Becher with the gesture of a painter.
The opposite of mass and individual, the big picture and the detail, is a theme in the work of Gursky. The majority of his works is taken out of an elevated perspective and the spectator gets a view on the total. Within the mass, the human becomes ornament, be it at the techno party or at the mass ballet Arirang in North Korea. Getting closer to the images, single people can be seen, but rather than functioning as recognizable individuals, they are a deputy of the spectator. This way, Gursky draws the spectator inside his world which is made out of stereotypical images of our information age.
Not only does Andreas Gursky redefine photography as a medium and presents an image of our times, he also analyses its structures and asks vital questions: how does the individual exist within the mass and what will this world look like in the future? This discourse is being held with regards to the microcosm of the individual or a single situation on the one side and the macrocosm of the globalised world and its structures on the other side.
© Andreas Gursky / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2007 - Courtesy Monika Sprüth / Philomene Magers - Andreas Gursky
