Andreas Gursky – Photographs 1994–1998

Andreas Gursky (*1955) is said to be one of the most convincing contemporary “image makers” of the photographic medium. At first he followed the conceptual and, in part, serial methods of his teachers, Bernd & Hilla Becher. This he soon abandoned in favour of individual images with subjective motifs. His early landscapes recall Casper David Friedrich in their drama and Claude Lorrain in their composition – his scenes filled with people, on the other hand, draw on everyday life, but also speak pictorially of mass and power.

His new work is even more stringent, in form and in content: architecture, i.e. the Prada Shoe Shop, is transformed into sculptured construction, stock markets become geometrical, instrumentalised centres of capitalist power and “raves” with thousands of people metamorphose into temples of modern spirituality. Gursky’s large formats present, at first glance, easily accessible perspectives of an image, which then open up into an endless microscopic cosmos upon closer examination. His photography fascinates through its precise, “picturesque” perception and the eternity of its extended moment.

The exhibition was curated by Andreas Gurksy and Veit Görner. Realisation in Winterthur: Urs Stahel. A cooperation with the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, the Serpentine Gallery, London, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, and the Centro Cultural de Bélem, Lissabon.