Tuesday 3 January 2012

Andrew Gursky

Andreas Gursky: 99 Cent


Andreas Gursky: Montparnasse

Andreas Gursky: Tokyo Stock Exchange


Andreas Gursky: Mayday

I particularly like Andrew Gurskys work because it shows mass numbers of people without focusing on anyone. The images are in sharp focus meaning no one stands out more than anyone else so you do not look at anyone individually.


Few of us have traveled as widely as Gursky and fewer still have visited such places as the Tokyo stock exchange, the Siemens plant at Karlsruhe, the General Assembly building in Brasília, or the Sha Tin racetrack near Hong Kong. But our omnivorous image industry—the slick illustrations of corporate advertising, the overabundant photography of magazines and newspapers, the ceaselessly roving eye of television—has processed, packaged, and delivered all of this and more. Gursky’s originality lies in the vividness and wit with which he has distilled compelling images from the plenitude of this commercialized image world.


The distinctiveness of this achievement arises from the hybrid character of Gursky’s art, which draws upon a great diversity of precedents, currents, and techniques. He has embraced the gaudy blandishments of advertising without abandoning the keen observations of documentary photography. He has emulated the grandeur of German Romantic painting and the principled reserve of Minimalist abstraction in part by exploring the hyperbolic fictions of digital manipulation. Gursky’s polished, signature style is the fruit of restless experiment; the more he has welcomed divergent and often mutually antagonistic impulses into his art, the more it has become his own.

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