Colecciones de arte

Trajectory

Essen (Germany), 1955

Son of Willy Gursky, a well-known industrial photographer, Andreas grew up in Düsseldorf learning the tricks of the trade before graduating from secondary school. During the late seventies (1977-1979) he attended the Folwangschule in Essen, where Otto Steiner, after the raising of the Berlin Wall in 1961, had established an important educational centre for professional West German photographers, especially in the fields of photojournalism and graphic design. Also in Essen, Gursky came into contact with the documentary tradition of German photography -August Sander- characterised by a certain degree of improvisation and a formal composition not in keeping with the aesthetic dictates of commercial photography.

He continued his studies at the Staatliche Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf (1980-1987) where he opted for the independent study programme Freie Kunst and became a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Along with that of other classmates at this school -Candida Höfer, Tata Ronkholz, Thomas Ruff and Petra Wunderlich-, Gursky's work began to receive international recognition in the decade of the eighties, as it belonged to the so-called New School of German Photography, whose basic feature was an aseptic approach to the representation of contemporary society. Since then his work has been exhibited in myriad European and U.S. venues, most noteworthy of which were his one person exhibitions at the SF MoMA in 2003, the Georges Pompidou centre of Paris in 2002 and the MoMA New York in 2001.

His photographs currently win heretofore unheard of prices for photography and his works are often sold in auction houses all over the world; Paris, Montparnasse, 1993, holds the record for the most expensive photograph ever sold.

Throughout his career, Gursky has managed to channel all his varied formative influences into an attractive body of work, first produced mainly in Düsseldorf and later expanded upon throughout his extended travels to Cairo, New York, Brasilia, Tokyo, Stockholm, Chicago, Athens, Singapore, Paris and Los Angeles, among other places.

His photographs, in large-scale formats and saturated with colour and detail, often depict places of human exchange linked to the society of advanced capitalism, public spaces such as airports, stations, discotheques, stock exchanges, parliaments, industrial plants, offices, hotels, supermarkets and swimming pools, in addition to places where the human element constitutes merely an anecdotal trace. Gursky thus postulates a reflection on our civilisation, as he is particularly intrigued by the dialectic between things individual and collective, the dialogue with the history of art, and capturing the essence of modernity. A. S.