Andreas Gursky photography

One of the most famous of the contemporary art photographers is Andreas Gursky. Gursky was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1955. He makes large-scale colour photographs distinctive for their incisive and critical look at the effect of capitalism and globalisation on contemporary life.

Gursky studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher (see previous blog post) at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the early 1980s and first adopted a style and method closely following the Bechers’ systematic approach to photography, creating small black-and-white prints. In the early 1980s, however, he broke from this tradition, using colour film and spontaneous observation to make a series of images of people at leisure, such as hikers, swimmers and skiers, depicted as tiny protagonists in a vast landscape.

Since the 1990s Gursky has concentrated on sites of commerce and tourism, making work that draws attention to today’s burgeoning high-tech industry and global markets. His imagery ranges from the vast, anonymous architecture of modern day hotel lobbies, apartment buildings and warehouses to stock exchanges and parliaments in places from as far a field as Shanghai, Brasília, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. Although his work adopts the scale and composition of historical landscape paintings, his photographs are often derived from inauspicious sources: a black and white photograph in a newspaper, for example, that is then researched at length before the final photograph is shot and often altered digitally before printing.

Andreas Gursky has exhibited internationally, including Sydney Biennial (2000), 25th São Paolo Biennial (2002) and Shanghai Biennale (2002) and Venice Biennale of Architecture (2004). He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (1998), Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (all 2001), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2007), Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2008) and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2009).

 1982 Desk Attendants, Spaeter, Duisburg

 1993 Montparnasse

 1994 Hong Kong Island

 1994 Hong Kong Shanghai Bank

 1995 Centre Georges Pompidou

 1996 Prada

 1998 Bundestag

 2000 EM Arena II

 2000 Shanghai

 2001 Avenue of the Americas

 2002 Copan

 2003 PCF, Paris

 2005 Bahrain I 

 2006 May Day V 

 2007 Kamiokande 

 2008 Untitled XVI 

 2009 Bibliotek 

 2009 Jumeirah Palm