Andreas Gursky
March 22–May 12, 2007
London
Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are delighted to announce the opening of their new gallery in London and the inaugural exhibition of recent works by Andreas Gursky. This is the artist’s first UK show since the Serpentine Gallery exhibition in 1998 and is being held jointly with White Cube at Mason’s Yard.
Gursky’s sumptuous large scale photographs of mass events, stock exchanges (of which Kuwait Stock Exchange is the most recent), futuristic architecture and altered landscapes address 21st century concerns such as capitalism and globalisation, the place of the individual in the technological age and man’s impact on the natural environment. Taken from an elevated vantage point, the figures in Gursky’s photographs are often subsumed by their surroundings, reduced to mere details or lost in a sea of humanity.
Extending the rigorous photographic techniques taught by Bernd and Hilla Becher, with their emphasis on objectivity and the single viewpoint, Gursky’s approach is more akin to a painter. A painstaking process of seamlessly joining and manipulating multiple exposures creates, in the case of Bahrain I, for example, a highly individual and gestural interpretation of a Formula 1 race track.
In Tour de France I he takes two different shots of the scene, one from an elevated helicopter perspective and one from the mountain opposite, creating a composite of the two and enhancing the picture’s authenticity. This condensation of various spatial and temporal moments in one image is a technique Gursky often applies in his work.
