Video production: Carolin Röckelein/Soundtrack and voiceover: Erin Lang

If the Bauhaus school left a legacy we can still see today in our urban landscape, Gursky takes up one of the most influential designers of our era in Apple (2020). In October 2019, Gursky’s portrait Sir Jonathan Ive (2019) was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery, London, showing the Apple designer in the company’s new headquarters, which was designed by Foster + Partners in close cooperation with Ive. Apple (2020), photographed at the exact same spot, features iPhones and various generations of computers where the designer stood in the earlier photograph, but placed on pedestals and lined up along the curved window as if in a museum. In sharp contrast to the functional, minimalist architecture of Bauhaus and the sleek design of Apple, Pigs I (2020) portrays the animals in a rustic and seemingly organic habitation, yet as the presence of the cylindrical hale bales suggests, a space equally as artificial as the Apple HQ.

In the smaller gallery hangs a group of pictures that together look at how a photograph can address themes of time, texture and intimacy. A und E (2020) is the private portrait of a woman and her newborn baby in soft, ambient light. Königsbergerstrasse, diptych (2020) has a similarly intimate, if playful, mood: A woman in a modest domestic space stretches to place a wooden block atop a precarious construction, seemingly the climactic end of a game. The diptych builds a tension around the potential for a photograph to capture narrative or movement.

Tokyo and Utah (both 2017) capture landscapes from the perspective of a camera in motion—Tokyo from a train, Utah from a car. While the blur evokes movement, it also brings a painterly texture to the surface of the photograph. 
 
Similarly, Untitled XXIII (2020), hanging at the entrance to the upstairs gallery, has a warm, blurred texture. The photograph seems to depict an everyday box or shipping container, yet the painterly surface, at once reminiscent of an antique painting or an under lit smartphone snap, gives the picture a haunted look. 

Utah, Tokyo and Königsbergerstrasse, diptych (2020) all feature in our online exhibition, Space is Time.

The upper floor of the gallery is devoted to three new pictures of The Hong Kong Bank, Sir Norman Foster’s iconic high-rise. While his first photograph of the subject, Hong Kong, Shanghai Bank (1994), expressed the optimism and transparency of modernism, each of the three new works portray the building in a different light. In Hong Kong, Shanghai Bank I (2020) a red-orange diode curtain obscures the windows, a screen against prying eyes. In Hong Kong Shanghai Bank II (2020), the façade seems to reflect the current events in front of the bank: A sea of colorful umbrellas, a reference to the 2014 Umbrella Movement. Words in horizontal bands stretch across the façade of the building in Hong Kong Shanghai Bank III (2020). Highlighting everything from cultural figures to political flashpoints, the words invite the reader to reflect on the powerful structures that filter our interpretation of historical events. 
 
In the space outside the upper floor gallery, the diptych Pigs II (2020) revisits the same setting as Pigs I, where the animals sprawl contentedly in lush beds of golden hay. Placing himself at eye level in an immaculately maintained organic pig farm in southern Germany, Gursky raises issues about the sustainable and ethical breeding of animals for human consumption. The image of cosseted pigs offers a contrast to the stark workplaces depicted in the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank pictures, as well as images of intensive farming explored in previous works such as Greeley (2002) and Fukuyama (2004).