Andreas Gursky

Born 1955 Leipzig, Germany.
Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.

«Andreas Gursky is known for his large-scale panoramic overviews of mass events, architecture, landscapes as well as commercial and leisure sites, capturing the human condition in modern life. He extends the documentary approach of his teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher by making slight digital changes to the photographs, thus reinforcing their perceptual illogic, produced by the oscillation between the almost ornamental structure of the whole and a surfeit of detail. No wonder he has encountered ideal subjects in the North Korean Mass Games, where colourful pictures are performed by thousands of people (Pyongyang, 2007) and on the Kuwait Stock Exchange (2007) where hundreds of brokers move across the floor in white garments. By contrast, there is no human presence in Kamiokade (2007), Gursky's photograph of a subterranean detector of neutrinos, elementary particles of matter that have almost no mass and zip around at a speed nearly as fast as light two tiny boats floating on a dark pool of water are dwarfed by the curved, shimmering interior of the cylindrical detector, which is lined with parallel rows of huge gold spheres creating an image like Böcklin's Toteninsel boats in a huge disco. Sometimes Gursky's perspective engenders an indeterminacy that veers sharply from the real toward abstraction, like in Bahrain I (2007) where a racetrack meanders through the desert like a serpent. The stands and a settlement in the background appear in sharply realism but the tarmac is folded and knotted in ribbons until it appears like an M.C. Escher perspective absurdity viewed through a funhouse mirror. » C. Es.