Andreas Gursky
(January 15, 1955) is a German visual artist known for his enormous
architecture and landscape color photographs, often employing a high
point of view. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery in New
York and by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in Europe.
He was born in Leipzig in 1955, but he grew up in
Düsseldorf, the son of a commercial photographer. In the early
1980s, at Germany's State Art Academy, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf,
Gursky received strong training and influence from his teachers Hilla
and Bernd Becher, a photographic team known for their distinctive,
dispassionate method of systematically cataloging industrial
machinery and architecture. A similar approach may be found in
Gursky's methodical approach to his own, larger-scale photography.
Other notable influences are the British landscape photographer John
Davies, whose highly detailed high vantage point images had a strong
effect on the street level photographs Gursky was then making, and to
a lesser degree the American photographer Joel Sternfeld.
Before the 1990s, Gursky did not digitally
manipulate his images. In the years since, Gursky has been frank
about his reliance on computers to edit and enhance his pictures,
creating an art of spaces larger than the subjects photographed.
Writing in The New Yorker 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 sensation that something was happening—happening to me, I suppose, although it felt more generalized than that. Gursky's huge, panoramic color prints—some of them up to six feet high by ten feet long—had the presence, the formal power, and in several cases the majestic aura of nineteenth-century landscape paintings, without losing any of their meticulously detailed immediacy as photographs. Their subject matter was the contemporary world, seen dispassionately and from a distance."
Visually, Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, man-made
spaces—high-rise facades 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's Dance Valley festival photograph,
taken near Amsterdam in 1995, depicts attendees facing a DJ stand in
a large arena, beneath strobe lighting effects. The pouring smoke
resembles a human hand, holding the crowd in stasis. After completing
the print, Gursky explained the only music he now listens to is the
anonymous, beat-heavy style known as Trance, as its symmetry and
simplicity echoes his own work—while playing towards a deeper, more
visceral emotion.
As of early 2007, Gursky holds the record for
highest price paid at auction for a single photographic image. His
print 99 Cent II, Diptych, sold for GBP 1.7 million (USD $3.3
million) at Sotheby's, London.
