Königsbergerstrasse, diptych (2020) may not immediately bring to mind a work by Andreas Gursky. Instead of an expansive view of a landscape or a building, we see two pictures of a woman playing a game in a domestic space. Moreover, the photographs resemble the kind of private snapshots uploaded onto social media platforms. Look closely, however, and you might discern a few of Gursky’s key themes: Architecture, duration, entropy, frames, the tension between pictorial space and the potential for narrative. But here the artist introduces a sense of playfulness, even absurdity. A woman, with a box over her head, stands on a sofa, reaching to the peak of a toy construction that resembles the Tokyo or Eiffel towers. In the second picture (if we read left to right), she leans forward, attempting to place a block of wood atop the structure. Is this a metaphor for the precarious state of the planet? What happened before the first picture, and what will happen next?
We will never know. There is no before or after. Part of the pleasure of pictorial art is the information it withholds. For all its apparent simplicity, Königsbergerstrasse, diptych (2020), opens up an infinite “spacetime” for the viewer’s imagination. Only the viewer can complete the tower, or bring it crashing down to earth.