Untitled X

Exhibited as part of the artist's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2001, Untitled X embodies the underlying conceptual ambition of Andreas Gursky's carefully choreographed, conceptually rooted photographs. An extreme close up of a leaning, gnarled tree, the image is a detail of John Constable's Salisbury Cathedral, 1829, reproduced on a mammoth scale. With a cinematic richness, Unitled X transforms the descriptive, painterly vocabulary of one of the most celebrated romantic landscape painters into the raw material of abstraction.

Part of a series of works that reconceptualises recognized artistic icons; paintings by Jackson Pollock, JMW Turner, and Van Gogh, Gursky draws attention to how even in our collectivized, capitalist culture we still place value on pastoralism and the romantic notion of the artist as an individual. As with the vast, objectified panoramas with which Gursky is perhaps best known, the artist uses digital technology in order to generate an image that fluctuates between reality and an artist's imagination, presenting us with a monumental artificial reframing of the world.