Andreas Gursky is considered one of the most famous contemporary photographers. His work titled Rhine II (1999) in 2011 was sold at Christie’s auction in New York for 4,338,500 million dollars, establishing a historical record in the sale of a photograph, which lasted for more than ten years. Several of his images have achieved the status of contemporary icons, helping to establish photography’s status as an art form and therefore worthy of collection by museums and individuals alike.
Gursky’s name in photographic literature, underlined by Urs Stahel, curator of the exhibition Visual Spaces of Today at the MAST Foundation in Bologna – “it means much more, it is an art form, a world-famous name, a brand, yes, a brand that since the late eighties and early nineties stands for “Grossfotografie”, for “photography large format ”, for “photography and art”, as well as for registrations in auction houses, and therefore, above all, for a new era of photography: photography in the art museum, photography in the art collection» . However, when you find yourself in front of its impressive images, despite their fame, size and obsessive sharpness in every detail, you have the feeling that something is not clear, that something is missing. We feel overwhelmed, we wonder what is the right key to understand the enigma and fully grasp the meaning of these silent and monolithic representations.
First of all, the source of this disorientation is the challenge that Gursky throws at the viewer on how to use his works. The large format and the long-term concentration on the construction of a single image constitute a position, a statement of architectural, visual and content intentions. In fact, his ability is to have managed to merge these criteria of the pictorial tradition in photography, completely transforming the exhibition experience; “Gursky is not a painter – stresses Urs Stahel – but he uses a similar conceptual basis in the idea of wanting to create an image, he uses all the elements of photography and he does it in a completely new way”.
The forty images by the Düsseldorf artist on display span a wide period of time; here are the first works (Krefeld, Huhner1989) along with more recent works such as V&R II AND V&R third (2022), representations of the world of Salerno (1990) and Hong Kong (2020), his reflections on the modern tourism industry with Rimini (2003), about fashion with prada me (1996) and on millennial production processes (Salinas2021) without neglecting the most famous works, such as the aforementioned Rhine II (1999), 99 cent II, diptych (2001) and Amazon (2016). «Gursky –Stahel continues in our conversation– shows us the way in which we treat and organize the world, for better or for worse, without any judgment or pretension of a solution. He is like a seismograph of our time who is simultaneously capable of writing an essay about the world, about the lives of others, a visual literature. He creates fantastic images, contemporary symbols that are individually interesting but, if we look at them together, they represent a state of the art, of photographic art and of our time ».
Although Andreas Gursky in his works seems to want to concentrate on capturing the essence of contemporaneity in the various modes of work, economy and globalization, registering production sites, merchandise movement centers, consumer temples, transport centers, offices of the financial industry, places of energy and food production, actually, as the artist himself points out, in his work and in this exhibition «the human being is always at the center. Many times he is not seen, but is portrayed through his behavior, his actions, his way of building. I am not interested in the individual, but in the human species and its environment ».
The precision with which Gursky dissects the present and approaches his themes, getting to the bottom of things while keeping the big picture clear in a personal construction of reality, is the daughter of his formative years within the famous School of Photography from Düsseldorf or Becher Schule and the implementation of aesthetic research on the “new objectivity” of husband and wife Bernd and Hilla Becher. «Gursky – concludes Urs Stahel – for decades he has always identified and photographed the most significant and symbolic global situations, he reveals critical issues to us, but at the same time with his images he wants to keep alive and renew our interest in the world, in its beauties, its dark sides and its complexities. She explores the particular, the current, the contemporary, in search of signs, rules and recurring structures of coexistence, of producing, acting and ordering the world ».
The images: 1. Salinas (2021) 2. Amazonas (2016) 3. Salerno (1990)
