Andreas Gursky

Gagosian is pleased to present a major exhibition by Andreas Gursky.

At the 21st Street gallery, Gursky will premiere Bangkok, a new series of large-scale works, in tandem with the majestic Ocean series of 2010, which is being shown in New York for the first time.

Just as history painters of previous centuries found their subjects in the realities of everyday life, Gursky finds inspiration in his own spontaneous visual experience and through reports of global phenomena in the daily media. The resulting pictures have a formal congruence deriving from a bold and edgy dialogue between photography and painting, empirical observation and artfulness, conceptual rigor and spontaneity, representation and abstraction. Gursky’s worldview fuses the flux of life and nature with the stillness of metaphysical reflection.

In the Ocean series (2010), Gursky relinquished his position behind the camera to work with satellite images of the world as raw material, resulting in contemporary mappe del mondo on a scale befitting the cosmic grandeur of the subject. While flying from Dubai to Melbourne, Gursky began watching the flight-path program. Suddenly he saw the graphic representation—which depicts the edges and tips of sharply delineated land masses with wide blue expanses of ocean between—as a picture. The ensuing process from diagram to large-scale photographic work proved to be very involved. He sourced high-definition satellite photographs augmented from the Internet, but given that these photographs were limited to exposing the land masses only, he was obliged to generate totally by artificial means the oceans and liminal zones that dominate his own images. Thus, in the darkly nuanced surfaces of the Ocean photographs—for which he even consulted shoal maps to obtain the appropriate visual veracity—Gursky reconciles the division between the machine eye and the human eye, continuing the debates and practices begun in the nineteenth century regarding photography and the issue of artistic expression versus objective science.