Andreas Gursky makes large-scale colour photographs, distinctive for their incisive and critical look at the effect of capitalism and globalisation on contemporary life.

Gursky studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the early 1980s and first adopted a style and method closely following Becher’s systematic approach to photography, creating small, black-and-white prints. In the early 1980s, however, he broke from this tradition, using colour film and spontaneous observation to make a series of images of people at leisure, such as hikers, swimmers and skiers, depicted as tiny protagonists in a vast landscape.

Since the 1990s, Gursky has concentrated on sites of commerce and tourism, making work that draws attention to today’s burgeoning high-tech industry and global markets. His imagery ranges from the vast, anonymous architecture of modern day hotel lobbies, apartment buildings and warehouses to stock exchanges and parliaments in places from as far a field as Shanghai, Brasília, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. Although his work adopts the scale and composition of historical landscape paintings, his photographs are often derived from inauspicious sources: a black and white photograph in a newspaper, for example, that is then researched at length before the final photograph is shot and often altered digitally before printing.

Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1955 and lives and works in Düsseldorf. He was appointed Professor of Liberal Arts at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in 2010 and has exhibited internationally, including at Venice Biennale of Architecture (2004), Shanghai Biennale (2002), 25th São Paolo Biennial (2002), and the Sydney Biennial (2000). His work is currently on show in a solo exhibition at The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2014) and other recent exhibitions include The National Art Center, Tokyo (2013), Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf (2013) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2012). A solo exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York toured to Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, MCA Chicago and SF MOMA, San Francisco (2001). His first retrospective was shown at Haus der Kunst in Munich and toured Istanbul Modern to Sharjah Art Museum (2007) and from Ekaterina Foundation, Moscow to National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2008). Another major exhibition ‘Andreas Gursky: Werke 1980-2008’ originated at the Museum Haus Esters Haus Lange, Krefeld (2008) travelled to Moderna Museet, Stockholm and at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2009).

-White Cube

Image: © Andreas Gursky
Courtesy of the artist and White Cube