Andreas Gursky
“It is not pure photography, what I do,” Gursky describes his own work. “All my pictures are based on a direct visual experience from which I develop an idea for a picture, which is subjected to testing in the studio and eventually worked on and precised at the computer.
BIOGRAPHY
Andreas Gursky is a German photographer, he was born in Leipzig (January 15, 1955), but grew up in Dusseldorf, he is a son and grandson of commercial photographers, and is a visual artist known for his large format architecture and landscape colour photographs, often employing a high point of view. Andrea Gursky lives and works in Düsseldorf.
“Gursky’s work is characterized by the tension between the clarity and formal nature of his photographs and the ambiguous intent and meaning they present, occasioned by their insertion into a ‘high-art’ environment. It is comparable to that of contemporaries such as Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer, all of whom were influenced by the documentary approach of Bernd and Hilla Becher. During the 1980s and 1990s Gursky’s work took on an increasingly global range of subjects, and he presented his images on an ever larger scale. Through all his work runs a sense of impersonality, a depiction of the structures and patterns of collective existence, often represented by the unitary behaviour of large crowds. His images of the stock exchanges of North America and East Asia are exemplary in the way that he uses crowds to create a type of picture comparable in formal terms to the ‘all-over’ compositions of the Abstract Expressionist painters. In the early 1990s Gursky used this format to represent grand urban landscape vistas in the Far East, juxtaposing different urban zones and suggesting an interplay between the zones of leisure and commerce”
From 1978 to 1980, he studied in Folkwangschule, ad after that between 1981-1987 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Andreas 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). 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 didn't 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. “
The perspective in many of Gursky’s photographs is drawn from an elevated vantage point. This position enables the viewer to encounter scenes, encompassing both centre and periphery, which are ordinarily beyond reach. 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.
In a 2001 retrospective, New York's Museum of Modern Art described 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.
EXHIBITIONS
Gursky first exhibited his work in Germany in 1985 and has subsequently exhibited throughout Europe. His first solo gallery show was held at Galerie Johnen & Schöttle, Cologne, in 1988. Gursky's first one-person museum exhibition in the United States opened at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1998, and his work was the subject of a retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2001, touring to Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2001–2002.
COLLECTIONS
Andreas Gursky's works are part of worldwide collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; SFMOMA, San Francisco; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Kunsthaus Zürich. Along with Victor Pinchuk, private collectors said to own Gursky in depth are Eli Broad in Los Angeles, Mitchell Rales in Washington, DC, and Bernard Arnault in Paris [15] and Gennadiy Korban in Geneva.
WORKS
Most of Gursky’s photos come in editions of six with two artist’s proofs.
In the end of 2011, Gursky holds a new record for highest price paid at auction for a single photographic image. His print "Rhein II" sold for USD $4,338,500 (£2.7m) (€3.3m) at Christie's, New York on 8 November 2011.
This image is a vibrant, beautiful and memorable – I should say unforgettable - contemporary twist on Germany’s famed genre and favourite theme: the romantic landscape, and man’s relationship with nature. (By: Florence Waters)
And in 2013, Chicago Board of Trade III (1999-2009) sold for 2.2 million pounds, an auction record for a Gursky exchange photo.
As mentioned above, Andreas Gursky is known for his work with photos on a large scale (very big ones), as landscape photographs. In his pictures you can find a properly color balance, a symmetry and patterns that are unique, because they are fruit of his trained eye, beside this the position of the perspective make the photos look likes a drawn from a high point, allowing the viewer to see all the parts of the scenes, from centre and periphery, which are ordinarily beyond reach. The sum of all these elements of compositions is what made Gursky’s pictures so amazed. When you come to understand about this whole technique of observation and ability of the photographer, you can understand why their jobs are so grandiose, valuable and unique.
SELECTED WORKS
Gursky’s work creates new practices of seeing, exploring not only the spectacle created by modern development, but also the impacts that these developments create on the ways in which we view our world.
As mentioned, we can clearly see in the photo the intention to create a symmetry in place and a picture with employees of the factory. The top view of the picture allows us to see all the manufactures, enabling the viewer to have a notion of the total space of the site. Leaving nitida existing symmetry and pattern formed with the uniforms of workers (blue-pink, blue pink ...)
Andrea knew how to perfectly enjoy the variety of colors of umbrellas to create a pattern, and shape of the beach to break the monotony of the picture, and the perspective of the picture allows the observer to perceive it as a whole, but also to see the details same, especially umbrellas further away, that due to large scale photo, still clear.
OPINION
In my opinion, Andreas Gursky is a very special kind of photographer, not only by the type of pictures he takes (landscape photographs), but getting through it and bring together as important milestones in all your photos (such as symmetry, color, prints , patterns, textures, the point of view and other things), making your photos and a well own visual identity. His work is a more specific type of photography not only by the difficulty of your photos (to be on a large scale), but at the same perfectionism in relation to them, both in the "beginning of his career" Andreas refused to edit your photos, going to use Photoshop only years later and to make only small edits to your photos. Proving that photography is also a matter of view.
For these and other things, Andreas Gursky can be considered one of today's "geniuses of photography" modern, throughout their competence, skill and insight. So much that he has two of the ten most expensive photographs sold in the history of the current photo, and so if you can see, it gets possible to have more.
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