Andreas Gursky "The Big Picture"
By Billy Kung
Over a decade ago, I had my first encounter experiencing the large-scale works of German photographer Andreas Gursky. It was disorienting—I felt as if my entire being was drawn into the artwork by a powerful force—and there were so many details to be discerned in each image, which only fueled my fascination further. Gursky’s gigantic photographs, some of them up to two meters high and three meters long, had the presence and the stylistic power of 19th century landscape paintings, without losing any of their meticulous details and immediacy as photographs. On view currently at New York’s Parrish Art Museum is a career survey titled “Landscapes" featuring 19 of Gursky’s photographs from the 1980s to the present day.
Gursky was born in 1955 in Leipzig, in former East Germany. He studied under collaborative artist and photographer duo Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the early 1980s and began adopting a style and method closely following Becher’s systematic approach to photography, creating small black and white prints. After setting up a color darkroom with friends, he broke from traditional monochrome and began using color film to explore juxtapositions of nature and the automotive industry in the German Ruhr Valley, producing a series of images rendering clusters of people engaged in leisurely activities out in the open landscape. In the late 1980s through to the 90s, Gursky’s work adopted an increasingly global range of subjects, and he presented his images on an even bigger format than previously. From the vast, anonymous architecture of modern day hotel lobbies, supermarkets, apartment complexes and warehouses to stock exchanges and parliamentary buildings in cities such as Shanghai, Brasilia, Los Angeles and Hong Kong, the resulting bodies of works from this period took on a thematic and critical study into the effects of globalization on contemporary life.
