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Lot Essay
A key early work by Andreas Gursky, Niagara Falls, 1989, is an important precursor to the artist’s pantheon of awe-inspiring landscape photographs. An iconic, early image in Gursky’s oeuvre, Niagara Falls has been exhibited widely including the artist’s solo exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, and Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. Taking the vast, mist shrouded waterfall as its inspiration, Gursky’s, Niagara Falls fits within the artist's ambition to create photographic images that capture how human lives are affected and even controlled by their environment, and the smallness of man and the immensity of the world. Furthering the artist’s on-going investigation into capturing a globalized view, this work acts as a visual record of man’s attempt to tame the most tempestuous of natural wonders, as Gursky captures a tourist vessel careening into the heart of the thunderous cascade. By capturing the tourists within the frame, Gursky transforms the landscape to the intersection of nature, technology, and culture, the subject of the photograph becoming the larger than the waterfall itself.
Reconceptualised through Gursky’s lens, Niagara Falls is depicted as an active centre of human interest and interaction. By focusing on its role as tourist destination, Gursky places this monument as the subject of countless holiday photographs. In doing so, Gursky does not merely document how places look, nor does he merely reduce the fabric of our urban life to abstraction, but instead, he attempts to grasp and convey some essence of our existence in the cosmopolitan playground of the modern world.
An immersing, omniscient vision that borders on the sublime, Gursky situates the viewer perched above the landscape, as if we are just beyond the picture plane peering in. The camera’s aerial vantage point tilts the picture plane forward at an impossible angle that has been referred to as Gursky’s ‘God-like view’: 'I stand at a distance, like a person who comes from another world. I just record what I see’ (A. Gursky, quoted in C. Squiers, 'Concrete Reality’, Ruhr Works, September 1988, p. 29). It is from the remarkably distant point of perspective that the artist effectively captures a harmonious, holistic view of the world. As Gursky once explained, 'the camera's enormous distance from these figures means they become de-individualized so I am never interested in the individual but in the human species and its environment' (A. Gursky, quoted in V. Gomer, 'I generally let things develop slowly', partially reproduced at www.postmedia.net, [accessed 12 September 2013]). Dwarfed by nature, the single boat appears toy-like in scale compared to the vast waterfall it approaches. Offering a departure from reality, Gursky introduces an existential dimension, prompting the viewer to ask questions about the picture itself, the world it represents, and our own place within our own surroundings.
In the grand tradition of Turner, Monet and Twombly who expressed the sublime through the elemental force of rushing water, Gursky invigorates this time honored motif with his markedly contemporary perspective. As with all of Gursky’s great photographs, here he balances the sense of his intellectual progression of painting in the late twentieth century, with his acute relationship with tradition and most particularly Romanticism. The awesome spectacle of nature juxtaposed against the jettisoned boat cast into nature speaks directly to the great German Romantic painters of the 19th Century, and in this way Niagara Falls captures the sense of the artist's relationship with not only the landscape but also offers an oneiric atmosphere of man's place in a vast universe. Niagara Falls performs as a contemporary revisiting of Caspar David Friedrich's vision of the artist being dwarfed by the landscape that surrounds him.
Reconceptualised through Gursky’s lens, Niagara Falls is depicted as an active centre of human interest and interaction. By focusing on its role as tourist destination, Gursky places this monument as the subject of countless holiday photographs. In doing so, Gursky does not merely document how places look, nor does he merely reduce the fabric of our urban life to abstraction, but instead, he attempts to grasp and convey some essence of our existence in the cosmopolitan playground of the modern world.
An immersing, omniscient vision that borders on the sublime, Gursky situates the viewer perched above the landscape, as if we are just beyond the picture plane peering in. The camera’s aerial vantage point tilts the picture plane forward at an impossible angle that has been referred to as Gursky’s ‘God-like view’: 'I stand at a distance, like a person who comes from another world. I just record what I see’ (A. Gursky, quoted in C. Squiers, 'Concrete Reality’, Ruhr Works, September 1988, p. 29). It is from the remarkably distant point of perspective that the artist effectively captures a harmonious, holistic view of the world. As Gursky once explained, 'the camera's enormous distance from these figures means they become de-individualized so I am never interested in the individual but in the human species and its environment' (A. Gursky, quoted in V. Gomer, 'I generally let things develop slowly', partially reproduced at www.postmedia.net, [accessed 12 September 2013]). Dwarfed by nature, the single boat appears toy-like in scale compared to the vast waterfall it approaches. Offering a departure from reality, Gursky introduces an existential dimension, prompting the viewer to ask questions about the picture itself, the world it represents, and our own place within our own surroundings.
In the grand tradition of Turner, Monet and Twombly who expressed the sublime through the elemental force of rushing water, Gursky invigorates this time honored motif with his markedly contemporary perspective. As with all of Gursky’s great photographs, here he balances the sense of his intellectual progression of painting in the late twentieth century, with his acute relationship with tradition and most particularly Romanticism. The awesome spectacle of nature juxtaposed against the jettisoned boat cast into nature speaks directly to the great German Romantic painters of the 19th Century, and in this way Niagara Falls captures the sense of the artist's relationship with not only the landscape but also offers an oneiric atmosphere of man's place in a vast universe. Niagara Falls performs as a contemporary revisiting of Caspar David Friedrich's vision of the artist being dwarfed by the landscape that surrounds him.