ANDREAS GURSKY | St. Moritz, Restaurant

Private Collection, United States

Zurich, Kunsthalle Zürich, Andreas Gursky, March - May 1992 (ed. no. unknown)
Hamburg, Deichtorhallen; and Amsterdam, De Appel Foundation, Andreas Gursky: Photographs, 1984 - 1993, February - July 1994, p. 123, illustrated in colour (ed. no. unknown)
Dusseldorf, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Andreas Gursky: Photographs from 1984 to the Present, August - October 1998, p. 55, illustrated in colour (ed. no. unknown)
Krefeld, Kunstmuseum Krefeld, Haus Lange und Haus Esters; Stockholm, Moderna Museet; and Vancouver, Vancouver Art Gallery, Andreas Gursky: Werke 80-08, October 2008 - September 2009, p. 105, illustrated in colour (ed. no. unknown)

Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, New Haven and London 2008, p. 181, illustrated in colour (edition no. unknown)

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are some superficial scuffs to the artist's frame and Plexiglas in places.
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Powerfully blurring the micro- and macrocosm, the present sequence of works contains breath-taking snapshots into the humanly-altered natural world; exuding a compositional and chromatic balance that reminds us of the vertiginous miraculousness to the hard-won relationship between mankind and the Earth. Rendered with astonishing precision and detail, each of Andreas Gursky’s photographs is the work of months of research, and achieves a degree of focus and insight unsupported by the naked eye. Writing of his own work, the artist proposes that “you never notice arbitrary details in my work. On a formal level, countless interrelated micro and macrostructures are woven together, determined by an overall organisational principle. A closed microcosm which, thanks to my distanced attitude toward my subject, allows the viewer to recognise the hinges that hold the system together” (Andreas Gursky cited in: Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before, New Haven 2008, p. 158). If the greatness of Gursky’s  work lies principally in its re-conceptions of the objectivity-seeking ambitions of the Dusseldorf photography school from which he graduated, then the present works epitomise his idiom.  In direct response to his aesthetic forebears, Gursky creates a complex tension in his works partly induced by the framing of human dramas within immense containing spaces. Overwhelmed by scale, the narratives of human activity are rendered, in a way neither cruel nor sympathetic, inconsequential. The restaurant scene in St Moritz, Restaurant appears to play out in an interior refuge on which encroaches a thickly opaque exterior fog.  The tension in Gursky’s images is also often attributable to the inclusion of himself with his images; formally undermining any pretension to objectivity by showing the observer’s essential presence within the observed.  In Dolomiten, Cable Car, this suspense is literalised; a vulnerable, isolated cabin appears to float over a stark mountain ridge as the view towards the horizon is obscured by an impenetrable haze.

Düsseldorf, Rhein exemplifies a pair of properties that define Gursky’s photography: the unawareness of its human subjects to being beheld, and the uncanny divestment of any actual location to the photographer. The photographs lose indexicality: since the scenes feel humanly unobservable, they are severed from any real life experience.  Distanced from both creator and photographed subject, the image invites interpretation on wholly abstract terms. While the chromatic duality in Düsseldorf, Airplane recalls the exquisite colour-fields of Mark Rothko, the distanced gaze of Gursky’s eye renders Essen an Ed Ruscha-evocative meditation on the strangeness of peripheral urban spaces.

The five present works provide a spellbinding tour through Gursky’s revolutionary photographic language. From the crisp, lunar public park in Düsseldorf, Airplane, we reach the ghostly borderlands of the amorphous fringes of middle class Western European suburbia in Essen. Düsseldorf, Rhein seems perfectly to capture the close stasis of a day whose hazy summer heat slows the very tides of natural activity, while Dolomiten, Cable Car metonymises the precariousness beneath human endeavour in spite of bold technological advancement. St Moritz, Restaurant, in the sequence of the present works, could plausibly be situated at the peak reached by the cable car. Two diagonally opposed imagistic puncta – the birds outside, and the seated man who alone appears to have noticed the photographer – break the rigid orthogonals provided by the Barnett Newman-evocative vertical panes of the large windows behind the diners.