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Andreas Gursky

Text by Norman Bryson, Text by Werner Spies

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Following the 2010 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills, this magnificent set of slipcased books captures the grandness and lushness of the epic photographs of Andreas Gursky, one of the worldâ€™s greatest living photographers. In these new works, Gursky demonstrates that a photographer can make or construct--rather than simply take--photographs about modern life and produce them on the scale of epic painting. Just as history painters of previous centuries found their subjects in the realities of everyday life, he seeks inspiration in his observations of the human species in the world, whether firsthand or via reports of global phenomena in the daily media. The resulting pictures have a formal congruence deriving from a bold and edgy dialogue between photography and painting, empirical observation and artfulness, conceptual rigor and spontaneity, representation and abstraction. In pursuit of his aim to create ""an encyclopedia of life"" Gursky's world view fuses the flux of reality with the stillness of metaphysical reflection. From initially using the computer as a retouching tool, he began exploring its transformative potential, sometimes combining elements of multiple shots of the same subject into an intricate yet seamless whole, at other times barely altering the image at all. Over time his subjects have expanded to map and distill the emergent patterns and symmetries of a globalized world with its consensual flows and grids of data and people, architecture, and mass spectacle. In the new Ocean series, with their darkly nuanced surfaces, Gursky has worked to reconcile the division between the machine eye and the human eye, continuing the debates and practices begun in the nineteenth century regarding photography and the issue of artistic expression versus objective science.