Interested in the workings of globalization, consumerism, and social phenomena as they relate to society, Gursky investigates the realities of our changing planet. In this unique solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers’ New York gallery, Gursky’s new and recent works as well as a selection of his well-known photographs are placed in an intertextual dialogue with Old Masters. Engaging with the images inscribed into our collective memories by the history of painting – from Pieter Bruegel the Elder to J.M.W. Turner and Carl Gustav Carus – the show examines how contemporary images relate to ones of the past, prompting viewers to consider their function as a silent foundation of the way we see.

For this exhibition, Gursky pairs his photographs with blown-up facsimiles of Old Masters to explore the conditions of image-making and uncover the conscious and unconscious relationships between images created centuries apart.

Upon entering the gallery, viewers are confronted with Gursky’s Eisläufer and Bruegel’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap. Despite being separated by some five hundred years since their creation, both works display similarities in structure and composition. We see the harshness of winter and humankind’s capacity to adapt to and overcome extreme and precarious conditions. Gursky’s work, however, introduces a contemporary reference as crowds maintain social distance during the Coronavirus lockdown while walking and skating on the frozen Rhein in Düsseldorf.

On view in this exhibition for the first time, Lützerath (2023) refers to the German village in North-Rhine-Westphalia which was occupied by climate activists from 2020 to 2023 to protest lignite mining. Residents had been relocated for years, and the area was set for demolition due to the expansion of the Garzweiler II coalmine. In January 2023, police forcibly cleared the site, which was subsequently destroyed.

During the protest, environmentalists climbed trees and nested between branches as police in riot gear stood by and watched from below. Images like these have become familiar around the world since the act of tree-sitting became a popular form of demonstration in the 1980s and 1990s. Gursky’s image represents the global struggle to eliminate fossil fuel usage, failed environmental policy, and the rapidly worsening climate crisis. Nearby, a section of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562) depicts the first clash between Good and Evil when Lucifer turns against the divine authority.

The influential artworks brought together here by artists like Pieter Bruegel or in the next pairing William Turner help us form an understanding of ourselves. Our collective visual memory has a profound impact on our identities. The way we perceive nature, existence and community is informed by the compositions, content and aesthetics of works like these that lie dormant in the back of our minds. Our experience of these artworks – and the many paintings, photographs and other visual images that have intentionally or unconsciously echoed them over the past centuries – shapes our relationship with the world.

Offering a very different view of the sky compared to Lützerath, the nocturnal subject and strong sense of mood in Maldives (2023) recall the night as a prevalent theme in Romanticism. Next to it, Fishermen at Sea, J.M.W. Turner’s moonlit scene illustrating nature’s influence on humankind’s fate confirms the impression. The contrast between the bold moon and the faint glow of the lantern on the boat indicates the fishermen are fighting a losing battle against the waves. Not only does Turner’s composition and atmospheric lighting formally link to Gursky’s photograph, but the painting also reflects the recurring theme of the interdependence of nature and society, a key motif in the contemporary artist’s oeuvre.

Aletsch Glacier II (2024) revisits Gursky’s own work, an iconic view of the largest glacier in the Swiss Alps from 1993. In direct conversation with the earlier version, this new, equally engrossing photograph captures the stark decline in glacial mass, highlighting the significant impact the climate emergency has had on the landscape in the short span of just thirty-one years. Furthermore, we see echoes of Romantic paintings like The Chamonix Sea of Ice (1825–27) by Carl Gustav Carus, who studied under Caspar David Friedrich. The juxtaposition of these works lets the nineteenth-century celebration of the sublime – the invocation of pleasurable terror at the sight of overwhelming nature – meet Gursky’s portrayal of the coexistence of beauty and the looming threat of destruction in the Anthropocene.

Alongside the epic and sublime, Gursky also presents the prosaic – notably the breeding of livestock for food. The Dutch Old Masters frequently employed the motif of slaughtered animals in vanitas paintings, where ephemeral objects served as metaphors for the transitory nature of life. The slaughtered pig, in particular, historically symbolizes gluttony and greed. At first glance, there is something macabre about Barent Fabritius’ painting in contrast to Gursky’s photograph – the painted carcass next to the idyllic pig pen. However, both show a more natural approach to animals and are diametrically opposed to current practices of intense pig farming and over production through industrialised agriculture.

The concept of vanitas painting also provides an interesting way of rethinking Gursky’s techniques, where every depicted element is in hyper-focus, achieved through the use of software such as Photoshop. The artist presents a contemporary interpretation of reality beyond the possibilities of the human eye. In their day, overly perfect still lifes also illustrated a fictional reality. In both, metaphor and the imaginary emerge from what initially appears to be narrative and description.