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Lot Essay
‘Few artists have managed to distil the specific characteristics of a certain culture, the mindset of a generation, or the zeitgeist of an era into a single work. Just as a handful of iconic paintings have shaped our view of the Renaissance, so too has Andreas Gursky captured the essence of the economic and social situation of the late twentieth century’ (Nina Zimmer)
An immersive vision stretching over two metres in width, May Day I (1997) marks the dawn of one of Andreas Gursky’s most important series of works. Bathed in red and blue neon light, it depicts a sea of dancing revellers at Mayday: Germany’s oldest and most celebrated electronic music festival, held annually in Dortmund. It is the first in a sequence of five works created between 1997 and 2006, examples of which are held in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Kistefos Museet, Oslo, the Castello di Rivoli, Turin and the Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels. Inspired by his own fascination with trance and techno music, the rave would become one of Gursky’s most distinctive and personal subjects, taking its place within his encyclopaedia of stock exchanges, factories, hotel lobbies, landscapes, cityscapes and airports. Capturing a split-second of frenzied activity in intoxicating detail, the present work demonstrates his power to distil the chaos of contemporary human experience into a single hyper-real image. Taken during a period of economic recession, it offers a vision of sublimity and grandeur: the subversive, anti-establishment hedonism of the rave becomes a near-religious spectacle. The ceiling of the club is rendered in crisp high definition, whilst the mass of people below dissolves into an undulating blur, as if frozen in a state of ecstatic worship. The scene oscillates between abstraction and figuration, recalling at once the cool geometries of Minimalism, the debauched revelries of Hieronymus Bosch and the ornate intricacies of cathedral architecture. In Gursky’s hands, scenes of social, political and cultural charge are reduced to moments of vivid pictorial clarity that appear to transcend time, place and medium. The present work is an outstanding early demonstration of this ability.
During his days at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Gurksy was taught by the celebrated photographic duo Bernd and Hilla Becher, and was deeply influenced by their documentary approach to the German landscape. In 1993, however, he began to experiment with digital technology, allowing him to artificially manipulate colour, pixilation and perspective, and to combine multiple shots. The result, explains Peter Galassi, is ‘a fluid continuity between the relatively young vocabulary of photographic description and the immemorial vocabulary of pictorial invention in all its variety’ (P. Galassi, ‘Gursky’s World’, in Andreas Gursky, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2001, p. 39). Gursky’s crowded rave scenes were particularly suited to this approach. The software allowed him to abstract, blur and enhance the qualities of the individual figures at will, thus imbuing the chaotic mass with overarching patterns and harmonies. Following on from the 1995 work Union Rave, the May Day works would be joined by a number of other photographs on similar themes, including Love Parade (2001) and a series depicting the Cocoon Club in Frankfurt. With their panoramic, frequently elevated vantage points, these works assume an almost musical sense of rhythm, pulse and synchronicity. Indeed, the surging mass of dancers in May Day I is suspended like a paused track, caught in a hiatus between beats. The seemingly objective medium of photography thus becomes a means of reimagining reality: of envisioning new states of being within our everyday existence.
An immersive vision stretching over two metres in width, May Day I (1997) marks the dawn of one of Andreas Gursky’s most important series of works. Bathed in red and blue neon light, it depicts a sea of dancing revellers at Mayday: Germany’s oldest and most celebrated electronic music festival, held annually in Dortmund. It is the first in a sequence of five works created between 1997 and 2006, examples of which are held in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Kistefos Museet, Oslo, the Castello di Rivoli, Turin and the Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels. Inspired by his own fascination with trance and techno music, the rave would become one of Gursky’s most distinctive and personal subjects, taking its place within his encyclopaedia of stock exchanges, factories, hotel lobbies, landscapes, cityscapes and airports. Capturing a split-second of frenzied activity in intoxicating detail, the present work demonstrates his power to distil the chaos of contemporary human experience into a single hyper-real image. Taken during a period of economic recession, it offers a vision of sublimity and grandeur: the subversive, anti-establishment hedonism of the rave becomes a near-religious spectacle. The ceiling of the club is rendered in crisp high definition, whilst the mass of people below dissolves into an undulating blur, as if frozen in a state of ecstatic worship. The scene oscillates between abstraction and figuration, recalling at once the cool geometries of Minimalism, the debauched revelries of Hieronymus Bosch and the ornate intricacies of cathedral architecture. In Gursky’s hands, scenes of social, political and cultural charge are reduced to moments of vivid pictorial clarity that appear to transcend time, place and medium. The present work is an outstanding early demonstration of this ability.
During his days at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Gurksy was taught by the celebrated photographic duo Bernd and Hilla Becher, and was deeply influenced by their documentary approach to the German landscape. In 1993, however, he began to experiment with digital technology, allowing him to artificially manipulate colour, pixilation and perspective, and to combine multiple shots. The result, explains Peter Galassi, is ‘a fluid continuity between the relatively young vocabulary of photographic description and the immemorial vocabulary of pictorial invention in all its variety’ (P. Galassi, ‘Gursky’s World’, in Andreas Gursky, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2001, p. 39). Gursky’s crowded rave scenes were particularly suited to this approach. The software allowed him to abstract, blur and enhance the qualities of the individual figures at will, thus imbuing the chaotic mass with overarching patterns and harmonies. Following on from the 1995 work Union Rave, the May Day works would be joined by a number of other photographs on similar themes, including Love Parade (2001) and a series depicting the Cocoon Club in Frankfurt. With their panoramic, frequently elevated vantage points, these works assume an almost musical sense of rhythm, pulse and synchronicity. Indeed, the surging mass of dancers in May Day I is suspended like a paused track, caught in a hiatus between beats. The seemingly objective medium of photography thus becomes a means of reimagining reality: of envisioning new states of being within our everyday existence.