Andreas Gursky is considered one of the best-known contemporary photographers. His work Rhine II (1999) sold for $4,338,500 million at a Christie’s auction in New York in 2011, setting a historic record for the sale of a photograph that has lasted more than ten years. Several of his images have achieved contemporary iconic status and helped establish photography’s status as an art form and therefore worthy of collection for both museums and individuals.
Gursky’s name in photo literature – as Urs Stahel, curator of the exhibition “Visual Spaces of Today” at the MAST Foundation in Bologna points out – “means much more, it’s an art form, a world-famous name, a brand, yes, a brand. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, this has stood for “large-scale photography”, for “large-format photography”, for “photography and art”, as well as for records in auction houses and thus overall for a new era of photography: photography in the art museum, photography in the art collection”. But when you stand in front of his impressive images, despite their fame, size and obsessive sharpness of every single detail, you get the feeling that something is not clear, that something is missing. We feel overwhelmed, we wonder what the right key is to understand the enigma and fully grasp the meaning of these silent and monolithic representations.
The source of this disorientation is, first of all, the challenge that Gursky poses to the viewer as to how to use his works. The large format and the long-term focus on the construction of a single image represent an attitude, an architectural, visual and substantive statement of intent. In fact, his ability lies in the fact that he has managed to fuse these criteria of pictorial tradition in photography and so that completely change the exhibition experience; “Gursky is not a painter – Urs Stahel emphasizes – but he uses a similar conceptual basis in the idea of wanting to create an image, he uses all the elements of photography and does it in a completely new way.”
The forty paintings by the Düsseldorf artist on display cover a wide period of time; here find his early works (Krefeld, Hühner, 1989) together with more recent works such as V&R II and V&R III (2022), representations from the world of Salerno (1990) and Hong Kong (2020), his reflections on modern industry with tourism Rimini (2003), fashion with Prada I (1996) and millenary production processes (Salinas, 2021), without neglecting the most famous works such as the already mentioned Rhine II (1999), 99 Cent II, Diptych (2001) and Amazon (2016) . “Gursky,” Stahel continues in our conversation, “shows us the way we treat and organize the world, for better or for worse, without any judgment or claim to a solution.” It’s like a seismograph of our time, who at the same time is able to write an essay about the world, about the lives of others, a visual literature. He creates fantastic images, contemporary symbols that are interesting individually, but when we look at them as a whole they represent a state of art, photographic art and our time.”
Although Andreas Gursky apparently wants to concentrate in his works on capturing the essence of contemporaneity in the different working methods, the economy and globalization, he captures production sites, centers of goods traffic, temples of consumption, transport hubs, offices of the financial industry, places of energy and food production, in reality, as the artist himself stated in his work and in this exhibition, “man is always at the center”. It is often not seen, but represented by his behavior, his actions, his construction. I am not interested in the individual, but in the human species and its environment.”
The accuracy with which Gursky analyzes the present and focuses on his themes, gets to the bottom of things and at the same time keeps the overall picture clear in a personal construction of reality is the result of his years of training at the famous Düsseldorf School of Photography or Becher School and the implementation of the aesthetic research on the “New Objectivity” of the spouses Bernd and Hilla Becher. “Gursky – concludes Urs Stahel – has always identified and photographed the most significant and symbolic global situations over the decades, he reveals the critical issues to us, but at the same time he wants to keep our interest in them alive and renewed with his pictures.” Welt, in their beauties, their downsides and their complexity. He explores the special, the present, the contemporary, in search of recurring signs, rules and structures of coexistence, production, action and the order of the world.”
The images: 1. Salinas (2021) 2. Amazon (2016) 3. Salerno (1990)