Andreas Gursky: Inherited Images

“Andreas Gursky stands out as one of the most important photographers of his generation. His monumentally scaled works have redefined the medium in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, capturing the circumstances of modern-day life in condensed form.

Interested in the workings of globalization, consumerism, and social phenomena as they relate to society, Gursky investigates the realities of our changing planet. In this unique solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers’ New York gallery, Gursky’s new and recent works as well as a selection of his well-known photographs are placed in an intertextual dialogue with Old Masters. Engaging with the images inscribed into our collective memories by the history of painting – from Pieter Bruegel the Elder to J.M.W. Turner and Carl Gustav Carus – the show examines how contemporary images relate to ones of the past, prompting viewers to consider their function as a silent foundation of the way we see.

For this exhibition, Gursky pairs his photographs with blown-up facsimiles of Old Masters to explore the conditions of image-making and uncover the conscious and unconscious relationships between images created centuries apart.

Upon entering the gallery, viewers are confronted with Gursky’s Eisläufer and Bruegel’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap. Despite being separated by some five hundred years since their creation, both works display similarities in structure and composition. We see the harshness of winter and humankind’s capacity to adapt to and overcome extreme and precarious conditions. Gursky’s work, however, introduces a contemporary reference as crowds maintain social distance during the Coronavirus lockdown while walking and skating on the frozen Rhein in Düsseldorf.

‘I have always spent a lot of time in museums and was able to see the paintings that have been recognized as masterpieces of Western history and its visual canon. This experience and influence have had an impact on my own work—I realized there were similarities to Old Masters that I had not intended; they weren’t conscious decisions in the genesis of my works.’ –Andreas Gursky”

https://spruethmagers.com/exhibitions/andreas-gursky-new-york/