Andreas Gursky, Receptionister, Salzgitter, Düsseldorf, 1982, © Andreas Gursky/BUS 2009, Courtesy Monika Sprüth Philomene, Färgfotografi typ C 43,2 x 52 cm.

Andreas Gursky, Utan titel XVI, 2008, © Andreas Gursky/BUS 2009, Courtesy Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Cologne Munich London, Färgfotografi typ C 237 x 506 cm

Andreas Gursky, Bahrain I, 2005, © Andreas Gursky/BUS 2008, C-Print, 302,2 x 219,6 x 6,2 cm, Courtesy: Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Cologne Munich London.

Andreas Gursky, Pyongyang IV, 2007, © Andreas Gursky/BUS 2008, C-Print, 304,5 x 207 x 6,2 cm, Courtesy: Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Cologne Munich London.

Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen
+46 8 5195 5200
Stockholm
Andreas Gursky
Works 80-08
21 February-3 May 2009 

Andreas Gursky, born in Leipzig in 1955 and now living in Düsseldorf, has for many years ranked among the world’s leading photographic artists. Works 80-08 is his largest exhibition to date, and the first to span his entire oeuvre. Gursky has selected more than 150 works, reaching back in time to his student days at Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, followed by the period in which he studied in the class run by Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. These photos, many of which have never before been published, lead up to his latest works, produced especially for this exhibition.

From the beginning Andreas Gursky has demonstrated that he has a keen eye for the ways in which people behave and for their longings beyond tedium and work. He has also revealed a special ability to imbue lifeworlds with personal emotional states and a gaze that aims beyond the topographical aspect to arrive at the whole. Although the earliest works mainly portray his closest surroundings, we can follow how he gradually moves in wider circles, until they encompass the global world. Also, by visiting places and events several times over a longer period of time, the artist not only throws light on different social contexts – such as capitalist or communist mass meetings – but also records changing structures. His photographs of large corporations and stock exchanges in the 1980s and onwards are examples of this.

Parallel to the development of these ideas Gursky’s pronounced interest in an abstract imagery led him to create pictures of both abundance and emptiness. Since 1992, he has made use of digital technology for these subjects — initially in the form of digital retouching, but eventually more explicitly. In this way, he achieves complex constructions of reality, but consistently with the intention of depicting social truths. Abstraction and representation are brought together here on a metaphorical level, and whether he is exploring work or recreation, large-scale livestock farming or spectacular events, hypermarket commodities or mountains of garbage, each photograph contributes a vital piece towards achieving Andreas Gursky’s declared aim: an “encyclopaedia of life.”

This exhibition of more than 150 works would have been impossible if the artist had not decided to make new prints of his entire output — with the exception of his very latest works — in small dimensions. This was a radical step, in view of the fact that Gursky has long been associated with large-format photography. A necessary procedure that at last enables us to accommodate his oeuvre’s encyclopaedic nature and bring qualities to light that often get overshadowed by others. The result is an exhibition that rests on two fundaments: firstly, the new works in large format — Andreas Gursky here and now — and secondly, the entire catalogue of works that allows us to view his oeuvre chronologically, to study his assertions about photography, to wonder at the affinities with painting, and to discover the relationships that arise between the pictures. Andreas Gursky exhibited for the first time in Sweden in 1995, at Rooseum in Malmö. Since then, his pictures have only been shown a few times here. It is therefore a great pleasure for us to introduce his work to the broader public in this way, and to enable those who have already discovered him to dive deep into Gursky’s rich oeuvre.
 
Curator of the exhibition is Fredrik Liew, Works 80-08 is organized by Dr Martin Hentschel, Kunstmuseum Krefeld in collaboration with Moderna Museet and Vancouver Art Gallery.

Andreas Gursky, Cocoon II, 2008, © Andreas Gursky/BUS 2008, C-Print, 211,5 x 506 x 6,2 cm, Courtesy: Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Cologne Munich London.

Andreas Gursky, Bibliotek, 1999, © Andreas Gursky/BUS 2008, C-Print, 200 x 360 x 6,2 cm, Courtesy: Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Cologne Munich London.

Andreas Gursky, Untitled XVI, 2008, C-Print , 237 x 506 x 6,2 cm, © Andreas Gursky / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2008, Courtesy: Monika Sprüth / Philomene Magers, Cologne Munich London.

Andreas Gursky, Untitled XV, 2008, C-Print , 237 x 506 x 6,2 cm, © Andreas Gursky / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2008, Courtesy: Monika Sprüth / Philomene Magers, Cologne Munich London.

MMK Museum
für Moderne Kunst
Frankfurt am Main
Domstraße 10
+49 (0)69 / 212 30 447
Frankfurt am Main
Andreas Gursky.
Cocoon / Frankfurt ...
June 14-August 17, 2008

With the exhibition Cocoon / Frankfurt Andreas Gursky presents a project especially developed for the Museum für Moderne Kunst. In the centre of the show stands the new work series Cocoon.

The new Cocoon images are investigating the current club culture. The big techno events designed by the Cocoon label serve the artist as a guideline. The architectural frame of the works refers to the space draft of the Cocoon club in Frankfurt. The space concept was developped by the techno dj and musician Sven Väth in cooperation with the agency 3deluxe. Gursky’s works cross-reference the graphical masters and thus form an ideal type approach to the original Cocoon club.

In the 1980s and 1990s Gursky started to produce prototypes of “global sceneries," in single works. In more recent years he dealt with themes significant for the times we live in, like the Formula 1 races, land reclamation projects in Dubai, and club scenes, always working in series. Since the middle of the 1990s Gursky has dealt with sociological phenomenon of techno and the techno scene. The raw material for the work resulting in this series are the legendary Mayday events which took place between 1995 and 2005 in the Westfalenhalle in Dortmund.

Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig in 1955, but grew up in Düsseldorf, the son of a commercial photographer. In the early 1980s, at Germany's State Art Academy, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Gursky received strong training and influence from his teachers Hilla and Bernd Becher, a photographic team known for their distinctive, dispassionate method of systematically cataloging industrial machinery. A similar approach may be found in Gursky's methodical approach to his own, larger-scale photography.

Before the middle 1990s, Gursky did not digitally manipulate his images. In the years since, Gursky has been frank about his reliance on computers to edit and enhance his pictures, creating an art of spaces larger than the subjects photographed. Writing in The New Yorker magazine, the critic Peter Schjeldahl called these pictures "vast," "splashy," "entertaining," and "literally unbelievable." In the same publication, critic Calvin Tomkins described Gursky as one of the "two masters" of the "Düsseldorf" school. In 2001, Tomkins described the experience of confronting one of Gursky's large works:

"The first time I saw photographs by Andreas Gursky … I had the disorienting sensation that something was happening — happening to me, I suppose, although it felt more generalized than that. Gursky's huge, panoramic color prints — some of them up to six feet high by ten feet long — had the presence, the formal power, and in several cases the majestic aura of 19th-century landscape paintings, without losing any of their meticulously detailed immediacy as photographs. Their subject matter was the contemporary world, seen dispassionately and from a distance."

Visually, Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, urban spaces — high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, the interiors of big box retailers. In a 2001 retrospective, New York's Museum of Modern Art called the artist's work, "a sophisticated art of unembellished observation…It is thanks to the artfulness of Gursky's fictions that we recognize his world as our own." Gursky’s style is enigmatic and deadpan. There is little to no explanation or manipulation on the works. His photography is straightforward.

Gursky's Dance Valley festival photograph, taken near Amsterdam in 1995, depicts attendees facing a DJ stand in a large arena, beneath strobe lighting effects. The pouring smoke resembles a human hand, holding the crowd in stasis. After completing the print, Gursky explained the only music he now listens to is the anonymous, beat-heavy style known as Techno, as its symmetry and simplicity echoes his own work — while playing towards a deeper, more visceral emotion.

As of early 2007, Gursky holds the record for highest price paid at auction for a single photographic image. His print 99 Cent II, Diptych, sold for GBP 1.7 million (USD $3.3 million) at Sotheby's, London.

He is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.

Andreas Gursky, Cocoon I, 2007, C-Print, 211,5 x 506 x 6,2 cm, © Andreas Gursky / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2008, Courtesy: Monika Sprüth / Philomene Magers, Cologne Munich London.