Andreas Gursky

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2008)

Exh. Cat., Munich, Haus der Kunst, Andreas Gursky, 2007, p. 107, illustrated in color (edition no. unknown) 
Exh. Cat., Basel, Kunstmuseum, Andreas Gursky, 2007-2008, p. 102, illustrated in color (edition no. unknown)
Exh. Cat., Krefeld, Kunstmuseum and travelling, Andreas Gursky, Werke - Works, 80-08, 2008, p. 214, illustrated in color (edition no. unknown)

This work is in excellent condition overall. There are no apparent condition problems with this work. The work is framed in a blonde wood strip frame under Plexiglas.
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Executed in 2006, Engadin II by Andreas Gursky is one of his most striking and conceptually advanced redefinitions of the grand tradition of the landscape genre. The viewer is confronted with an enormous expanse of pristine, virgin white snow stretching all the way up to a high horizon line of mountain peaks bathed in morning shadow and crisp blue skies. It is an image of nature at its most beautiful, unadorned and unsullied, immediately reprising connotations of the Romantic conception of sublime nature as a perfect vision of the snow-covered Engadin valley close to the Swiss mountain resort of St. Moritz. In the centre of this vertical expanse, two orthogonal lines guide our viewpoint from the foreground space into the far distant horizon line, initially taking the most direct route before meandering and disappearing into the valley. This compositional device, typically used by landscape painters from Claude Lorraine to Caspar David Friedrich to guide the viewer through the painted landscape, is here used by Gursky in his own utterly contemporary treatment of the genre. On closer inspection, we see that between these lines two phalanxes of skiers are traversing this otherwise virgin territory in one of the great sporting events of the St. Moritz calendar, the annual Engadin Ski Marathon.

The analogy to painting is an important one, for Gursky is the key protagonist in establishing parity between photography and painting in contemporary art practice. Acutely aware of his artistic heritage, he borrows liberally from other art forms to extend the range of his chosen media. Of course the observation and portrayal of people engaged in winter sports has long provided artists’ with an inherently entertaining source for subject matter, as famously exploited in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Winterscapes of the Seventeenth Century where tiny characters are caught in the evident re-learning of idiosyncratic seasonal sport. In more formal terms, Engadin II and the perspectival lines which contain the skiers are a blatant emulation of the compositional devices of classical painting. Like Caspar David Friedrich, Gursky creates terrific force through a commanding pictorial scaffold which, when scrutinised, reveals the remarkable premeditation and control of Gursky’s image-making. While traditional landscape painting provided receding, often winding perspective to lead the eye into the distance, foreground and background are here flattened and compressed by Gursky’s lens and the distance exaggerated by the photograph’s vertiginous format. Friedrich deployed such breathtaking devices to illustrate the divine order of existence; Gursky, on the other hand, uses the same techniques in photography to expose the subconscious order that permeates contemporary society. While Friedrich shows the beauty of untameable nature devoid of human presence, Gursky shows mankind’s ambition to overcome nature.

In this sense, Engadin II is a far more successful photograph than Engadin I, which had been executed in 1995. While the horizontal format of the earlier image emphasises the line of human presence in the natural landscape, the photographer’s position in the valley makes us a bystander to the sporting event. In the second version, however, reproduced on a larger scale not feasible with the printing technology available to the artist in 1995, we look down on the event from above, a shot achieved from the unnatural and quasi-divine elevated perspective of a helicopter. The result is to place the viewer in Gursky’s often lauded god-like vantage point, looking down on the line of athletes who are reduced to a trail of ants on the ground. Although up close they can barely differentiate themselves by their brightly coloured ski suits, the contrast against the white ground reduces our ability to see colour so that they are all equalised and made uniform. The skiers and their long shadows create a complex matrix of human activity: each group, made up of hundreds of skiers, behaves as a single organism. Like a flight of starlings, the individuals who make up this group seem to act as one, pulsating with a life source that unites them all. This is the only activity in an otherwise perfectly still landscape. All peripheral detail is airbrushed out of the image by careful digital manipulation, leaving nothing but the minimalist ribbon of human beings progressing towards the horizon line. The lakeside houses, clearly visible in Engadin I, disappear into the shadows in the later work, along with all other manmade incursions into the landscape like roads and avalanche barriers.

Gursky’s engagement with art history does not end with the masters of landscape painting. His efforts to reduce everything to its essence resemble the constructivist approach to early abstraction and it is easy to sense here his delight in the ravishing purities of Minimalism. As Peter Galassi explains, “Behind Gursky’s taste for the imposing clarity of unbroken parallel forms spanning a slender rectangle lies a rich inheritance of reductivist aesthetics, from Friedrich to Newman to Richter to Donald Judd.” (Peter Galassi in Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Andreas Gursky, 2001, p. 35)  Indeed, via his stark paring down to a fundamental formal structure, Engadin II provides abundant testimony to the significant influence of Minimalism on Gursky, and specifically its chief protagonist Donald Judd and his revered ‘Stack’ sculptures. In Engadin II, one also senses Gursky’s awareness of the conceptual premises of Land Art and of Richard Long in particular, where the human trace left behind in works such as Line Made by Walking, 1962 is echoed here in the tracks of the skiers across the frozen lake.  Using the lessons learnt from art history and the German Romantic tradition in particular, Gursky invests his images with a grandeur rarely found elsewhere in the photographic image.