Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky is one of the most celebrated figures in contemporary photography. His mesmerising large-format images capture the world in impossible, hyperreal levels of detail. Gursky depicts sites of human activity, architecture and natural phenomena. Through subtle strategies of manipulation, his photos distil pattern, structure and order from the chaos of globalisation.

Gursky was born in Leipzig in 1955 and grew up in Düsseldorf. He studied photojournalism at the Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen, where his teachers included Otto Steinert. Between 1980 and 1987 he attended the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. There, he studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher, known for their objective documentary images of the German industrial landscape. Among their other students were Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Axel Hütte and Candida Höfer. Along with Gursky, these artists would come to be known as the Düsseldorf School.

A turning point in Gursky’s early practice was the 1990 work Salerno I, depicting a commercial port in Italy. He was struck by the rich detail of the image and the sharp density of pattern that emerged from such an industrial scene. He began to photograph similar sites, including stock exchanges, airports and factories. These images prompted Gursky to begin working digitally in the early 1990s. He started to combine multiple shots, deleting and intensifying certain part of his images to emphasise colours and geometries. From a distance these works resemble abstract or Minimalist paintings. Up close, however, they resolve in staggering, crystalline detail.

During the 1990s Gursky photographed a wide range of subjects. Some of his best-known images include hotels in Atlanta and Times Square, trading floors, beaches, stores filled with Prada shoes and revellers at Germany’s May Day festival. By the turn of millennium, he had produced masterworks including 99 cent (1999), Chicago, Board of Trade II (1999) and Rhein II (1999). The latter sold for US$4,338,500 at Christie’s in 2011, setting a new world record for the artist. At the time it was the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.

Since then, Gursky has continued to travel the world. Among his more abstract images include his photos of the Bahrain International Circuit (2005–07) and his Bangkok series (2011). A major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London in 2018 celebrated his extraordinary contribution to photography, charting the full breadth of his career.