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Lot Essay
Andreas Gursky has demonstrated 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. 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. 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. 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 pursuit of his aim to create "an encyclopedia of life," Gursky's worldview fuses the flux of life with the stillness of metaphysical reflection.
The Ocean series of 2010 represents an important development in which Gursky has reassessed his working relationship with the photographic medium. Here, for the first time he steps away from his position behind the camera to work with satellite images as raw material, creating contemporary mappe del mondo on a scale befitting the cosmic grandeur of the subject. In their darkly nuanced surfaces, he works 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.
Like many of Gursky's wondrously complex images, the Oceans originated in a spontaneous visual experience. While flying from Dubai to Melbourne, Australia he became mesmerized by the flight-tracking monitor, showing the Horn of Africa to the far left, and the western edge of Australia to the far right, with the flat blue expanse between. The graphic representation occurred to him as a picture, but the path from this small diagram to large-scale photographic work proved to be very involved. High-definition satellite photographs were employed, however, given that these are generally limited to exposures of sharply contoured land masses, the transitional zones between land and sea, as well as the oceans themselves, had to be generated by artificial means, using details from various Internet picture sources. To convey the impression of real subaquatic depth required the most exacting visual construction -- he even consulted shoal maps to get the right color nuances for the sea -- a gigantic undertaking in which the skill required for him to represent a natural phenomenon compared only to his most contrived images. The roiling deep, dark blues offer a view of the sublime that is only otherwise to be found in painted seascapes.
Looking at Ocean V, it becomes evident that Gursky's interest is not scientifically cartographic. In this vast image, the distances bounded between Alaska and Antarctica do not follow any systematic program, other than aesthetic compositional principles, and the ocean -- of little importance in standard cartography because of its relative lack of economic merit -- is foregrounded. By placing the amorphous and mysterious expanses of ocean at the center, with just edges and fragments of land made visible, Gursky moves beyond traditional representations of cosmic order to address a more topical attitude towards life: to wonder at the persistence of nature in the face of mankind's progressive and willful attempts to destroy it.
The Ocean series of 2010 represents an important development in which Gursky has reassessed his working relationship with the photographic medium. Here, for the first time he steps away from his position behind the camera to work with satellite images as raw material, creating contemporary mappe del mondo on a scale befitting the cosmic grandeur of the subject. In their darkly nuanced surfaces, he works 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.
Like many of Gursky's wondrously complex images, the Oceans originated in a spontaneous visual experience. While flying from Dubai to Melbourne, Australia he became mesmerized by the flight-tracking monitor, showing the Horn of Africa to the far left, and the western edge of Australia to the far right, with the flat blue expanse between. The graphic representation occurred to him as a picture, but the path from this small diagram to large-scale photographic work proved to be very involved. High-definition satellite photographs were employed, however, given that these are generally limited to exposures of sharply contoured land masses, the transitional zones between land and sea, as well as the oceans themselves, had to be generated by artificial means, using details from various Internet picture sources. To convey the impression of real subaquatic depth required the most exacting visual construction -- he even consulted shoal maps to get the right color nuances for the sea -- a gigantic undertaking in which the skill required for him to represent a natural phenomenon compared only to his most contrived images. The roiling deep, dark blues offer a view of the sublime that is only otherwise to be found in painted seascapes.
Looking at Ocean V, it becomes evident that Gursky's interest is not scientifically cartographic. In this vast image, the distances bounded between Alaska and Antarctica do not follow any systematic program, other than aesthetic compositional principles, and the ocean -- of little importance in standard cartography because of its relative lack of economic merit -- is foregrounded. By placing the amorphous and mysterious expanses of ocean at the center, with just edges and fragments of land made visible, Gursky moves beyond traditional representations of cosmic order to address a more topical attitude towards life: to wonder at the persistence of nature in the face of mankind's progressive and willful attempts to destroy it.