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Lot Essay
Andreas Gursky’s Copan is an enthralling depiction of the Edifício Copan in downtown São Paulo. The building, one of the largest in Brazil, was designed by Oscar Niemeyer and completed in 1966; it is famed for its undulating façade, a swell of concrete which Gursky has skilfully captured in his majestic panorama. Created in 2002—the year that the artist’s landmark touring exhibition completed installments at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris—Copan reflects Gursky’s enduring interests in architecture and structure. The artist first began to explore these themes decades earlier when he studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Like his teachers’ ‘Typologies’ of pre-World War II industrial architecture, Gursky’s photographs too abstract their subjects’ formal elements. As with his celebrated Paris, Montparnasse (1993), Copan eliminates all but the traces of human presence, foregrounding the colours and shapes of the structure itself. Despite his enduring interest in architectural form, few of Gursky’s photographs capture a building in its entirety; Copan is a rare example of an epic exteriority. The work is part of an edition of six, examples of which have been exhibited at Tate Modern, London, Kunstmuseum, Basel, and the Haus der Kunst in Munich, among others.
Executed on a monumental scale, Copan invites the viewer to scrutinise every bijou feature of Niemeyer’s Modernist icon. Yet despite the heightened detail and chromatic richness—despite the photographic veracity—this is an invented scene. Its consistent focus is beyond the possibilities of the human eye or a single photographic frame. To create a view onto the world which few have the privilege to see, Gursky knits together multiple photographs to produce one composite image which he then prints using traditional processes. Copan, as such, is more real than reality. ‘Since 1992,’ he recalls, ‘I have consciously made use of the possibilities offered by electronic picture processing so as to emphasise formal elements that will enhance the picture or, for example, to apply a picture concept that in real terms of perspective would be impossible to realise’ (A. Gursky, quoted in L. Cooke, ‘Andreas Gursky: Visionary (Per)Versions’, Andreas Gursky. Photographs from 1984 to the Present, Munich 1998, p. 14). His photographs seek transcendence; by finding order within the chaos of life, Gursky reveals a contemporary sublime.
Executed on a monumental scale, Copan invites the viewer to scrutinise every bijou feature of Niemeyer’s Modernist icon. Yet despite the heightened detail and chromatic richness—despite the photographic veracity—this is an invented scene. Its consistent focus is beyond the possibilities of the human eye or a single photographic frame. To create a view onto the world which few have the privilege to see, Gursky knits together multiple photographs to produce one composite image which he then prints using traditional processes. Copan, as such, is more real than reality. ‘Since 1992,’ he recalls, ‘I have consciously made use of the possibilities offered by electronic picture processing so as to emphasise formal elements that will enhance the picture or, for example, to apply a picture concept that in real terms of perspective would be impossible to realise’ (A. Gursky, quoted in L. Cooke, ‘Andreas Gursky: Visionary (Per)Versions’, Andreas Gursky. Photographs from 1984 to the Present, Munich 1998, p. 14). His photographs seek transcendence; by finding order within the chaos of life, Gursky reveals a contemporary sublime.