Andreas Gursky

Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

 

Exhibition Catalogue, Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum; Winterthur, Fotomuseum; London, Serpentine Gallery; Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea; Lisbon, Centro Cultural de Belém, Andreas Gursky: Fotographien 1994-1998,1998, p. 79, illustration of another example in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle, Andreas Gursky - Photographs from 1984 to the Present, 1998, p. 110, illustration of another example in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, Krefeld, Kunstmuseum; Stockholm, Moderna Museet; Vancouver, Art Gallery, Andreas Gursky: Works 80-08, 2008-09, p. 135, illustration of another version in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the white border tends more towards pale cream, and there is more contrast between the mountain and the sky in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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Epic and utterly enveloping, Andreas Gursky’s photograph delivers an overwhelming mountain view of the snow blanketed Ofenpass, a high mountain pass located in the Swiss Alps. Building on such early Romantic tropes in Gursky's landscape canon as Cable Car Dolomites of 1987 and Niagra Falls of 1988, Ofenpass represents a turning point in the artist’s treatment of Sublime Nature. While undoubtedly evocative of the central transcendental conceit of the nineteenth-century German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, the almost monochromatic register of trees peppering an immaculately white and seeming endless alpine summit indicates Gursky’s increasing engagement with the high-art stratagems of abstraction. Executed in 1994, only two years following Gurksy’s adoption of digital manipulation for the composition of his pictures, this work stands as an early example of the artist’s coalition of German Romanticism with the minimalist conceits of contemporary painting. Furthering the artist's dramatic landscape pantheon, this work crucially foreshadows the epic vistas of the Engadine valley that would follow only a year later in 1995, whilst offering a stark view of uninhabited Nature that formally prefigures the epic minimalist conceit of Gurksy’s 1999 masterpiece, Rhine II.

In accordance with some of the most powerful and celebrated works of the artist's oeuvre, Ofenpass represents a formative photographic dialogue with the Romantic landscapes from Caspar David Friedrich's nineteenth-century practice. As outlined by Joseph Leo Koerner in his renowned study Caspar David Friedrich and The Subject of Landscape, Friedrich's works are defined as "a celebration of boundless indeterminacy in landscape ... as sign of our inability to appropriate nature" (Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and The Subject of Landscape, London 1990, p. 226). Indeed, within Gursky's stark expanse of seeming endless mountain landscape, the artist's early use of digital manipulation is utilised to incite a disembodied vantage point beyond the capacity of the single lens or even our binocular vision. As such Gursky’s photographic method somewhat reinstates the invention of impossible pictorial structures allied with the tradition of Romantic landscape painting. Adopting an analogous method, Gursky’s digital manipulation exploits a collision of opposites that in turn invokes a connection between earthly being and a sublime deific realm: "Since 1992 I have consciously made use of the possibilities offered by electronic picture processing, so as to emphasize 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 realize" (the artist cited in, Lynne Cooke, 'Andreas Gursky: Visionary (Per)versions' in: Exhibition Catalogue, Dusseldorf, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Andreas Gursky–Photographs from 1984 to the Present, 1998, p. 14).

Disembodied perspective and multiple vantage points are skilfully homogenised to engender a harmoniously compelling yet visually irresolvable image. Via a pictorial interweave of microstructure and enveloping macroscopic detail, Gursky frames and manipulates perspective and vantage point to confer an overwhelming and impossibly omniscient visual encounter. Exhibiting the extremity of Gursky's now signature master-trope of an elevated vantage point, a key photographic device gleaned from his formative mentors Bernd and Hiller Becher, Gursky’s Olympian perspective evokes god-like omniscience. However in Gursky's photographs, as Marie Louise Syring observes: "the tragic element is missing. Instead, the artist maintains an ironic distance" (Marie Louise Syring, 'Where is Untitled? On Locations and the Lack of Them in Gursky's Photography', in: Ibid, p. 7).

Unmistakably imbued with a cool minimalist detachment, any such allusion to Romantic subjectivity is counteracted by an almost puritanical degree of dispassionate indifference. Indeed, in a move that somewhat echoes the conceit of Gerhard Richter’s Photo Paintings, Gursky’s Ofenpass blurs the boundaries between photographic representation and painterly abstraction. The extreme distance, encompassing vista and almost monochromic palette incites a distinct dialogue with the formal principles of minimalism. Recalling the work of Brice Marden or the white monochromes by Robert Ryman, Ofenpass is testament to Gurksy’s growing engagement with and adoption of the strategies of contemporary painting - an increasing emulation that reaches an apogee with Gurksy’s iconic vision of the Rhine.

Delivering an impossible photographic image, not only for the naked eye but also for the single lens, Ofenpass simultaneously represents fiction and actuality in a subtle exploitation of the 'truth' associated with photography. Ultimately the possibility of a boundless Natural Sublime is thwarted by Gurksy's ironical detachment and planarity of his composition. Rather than being drawn into a disappearing horizon line to invoke a sustained melancholic absorption into the depths of infinity, the flat compression of multivalent views and focal points utterly suspends our vision causing our sight to forever navigate across the artificial planes of Gursky’s photographic creation. Though an allusion to Friedrich is pertinent, it is perhaps more apt to compare Gursky's reduced aesthetic and minimal colour palette to an evocation of Lyotard's post-modern Sublime. Here, sublimity is engendered not via a sense of awe-inspired reverence for a transcendental higher power, but through a tangible sense of the 'here-and-now' resonating from a visual suspension affected by the minimal confines of the work of art itself.