Andreas Gursky

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Private Collection

London, Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers; New York, Matthew Marks Gallery, Andreas Gursky, March - June 2007, pp. 56-57, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)
Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Haus Lange und Haus Esters; Stockholm, Moderna Museet; Vancouver Art Gallery, Andreas Gursky, Werke/Works 80-08, December 2008 - September 2009, p. 200, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)

This work is in very good condition overall. Under close inspection, there is evidence of faint color nuances located at the join of the original seam. The photograph is face-mounted to the Plexiglas and framed.
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Andreas Gursky captures the heady atmosphere of western farmland in his ever captivating and all-encompassing Greeley. The present image is galactic, depicting groups of cattle on an expansive rural Colorado homestead, sectioned off in a sloping grid and dissolving into the high horizon line. Gursky’s art casts a scrutinizing eye over the modern-day landscape, analyzing and highlighting the gargantuan nature of the vessels and domains he depicts.

 

Like Warhol before him, Gursky elevates the quotidian, often banal scenes of daily life and renders them as extraordinary. Whereas Warhol reproduces images based on their association with his personal life – he famously said, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There’s nothing behind it” – Gursky adopts the distant and detached views of his famed professors Bernd and Hilla Becher. Here, the high vantage point employed by the artist makes the viewer immediately aware that we are outsiders looking in, and Gursky makes a spectacle of herds of cows the same way he often does with mobs of people.  The composition echoes many of the artist’s pictures in which he transforms the frantic hustle and bustle of his human subjects into the sublime spectacle of aesthetic order: the panoramic view of asymmetrical planes, the scattered figures in an enclosed yet vast space, and the pens in which the cows graze like the offices or concerts in which people congregate. Gursky draws on his completely unique compositional sensibility to unify these locations in terms of line, form and viewpoint to comment on the commodification of our developed world.

 

Gursky has stated that he often photographs subjects “that are not meant to be specifically described” and rather seem as though “I could have photographed them anywhere.” (the artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, Andreas Gursky, 2007, p. 85). Unlike the power cities that identify Gursky’s Stock Exchange series - Chicago, New York, and Hong Kong to name a few – the town of Greeley is not immediately recognizable. By depicting this particular scene and simultaneously titling the image by its location, Greeley further asserts the artist’s ability to merge the universal elements of our developed world with the essence of the American west. Gursky thus finds a nexus between the Zen-like perfection of minimalist geometry and the realms of modern activity.