Andreas Gursky

Neither empirical nor cartographic but rather determined by compositional principles, Gursky’s Ocean photographs possess that sense of the “terrible” sublime associated with Romantic landscape painting and twentieth-century abstraction. The singular image Antarctic—an anthropormorphic land mass as inscrutable and uninhabitable as the sea—acts as a coda to the series: under the portents of global warming the icy, barren continent seems to be raising an apocalyptic finger, despite the beauty in its details.

It was serendipity rather than intention that found Gursky, one year later, shooting the Chao Phraya that flows through Bangkok and empties into the Gulf of Thailand. Nevertheless, the relationship with the Ocean series is clear: In the new Bangkok series, he moves in closer on his subject, capturing the details of the fast-flowing urban water mass through the lens of the abstract sublime. A major arterial waterway that is as compromised by man-made pollution as by disequilibrium in the natural hydrological regime, Chao Phraya is revealed by Gursky to be at once a dumping ground for all manner of man-made detritus (used condoms, a child’s bed mattress, a car tire), a crucible for ecological disorder (as evidenced by a dead fish and the pretty but devastating weed known as water hyacinth, floating in the water), and a reflecting, refracting surface for the modern city itself.

It is now common knowledge that ongoing natural disasters and human negligence compromise the well-being of the oceans and, thus, our own long-term existence. Add to this the recent alarm as rising floodwaters in and around the Chao Phraya Basin threaten to prompt the next in a string of massive environmental catastrophes. In images that are as conceptually profound as they are formally dazzling, and timeless and yet very much of their time, Gursky has touched a topical nerve in contemporary life, namely the impotence of humans in the face of increasing disequilibrium in the natural world that may once again render it uninhabitable.

A large-format, two-volume catalogue containing sumptuous plates that document the Ocean series and selected earlier works, as well as essays by distinguished art historians Norman Bryson and Werner Spies, was published by Gagosian in 2010 and is currently available.