Andreas Gursky

Galerie Philomene Magers, Munich

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2004 

New York, Matthew Marks Gallery, Andreas Gursky, May - June 2004 (edition no. unknown)

Munich, Haus der Kunst; Istanbul, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art; Sharjah, Sharjah Art Museum; Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria; and Moscow, Ekaterina Foundation, Andreas Gursky, February 2007 - May 2008, p. 97, illustrated in colour (edition no. unknown)

Krefeld, Kunstmuseum Krefeld, Haus Lange und Haus Esters; Stockholm, Moderna Museet; Vancouver, Vancouver Art Gallery, Andreas Gursky: Werke - Works 80-08, October 2008 - September 2009, p. 205, illustrated in colour (edition no. unknown, smaller edition)

Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Photography Reinvented: The Collection of Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker, September 2016 - March 2017, p. 43, no. 13, illustrated in colour (edition no. unknown)

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly less saturated in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The face-mounted print is seamed vertically along the centre. Close inspection reveals a few extremely minor nicks to the artist's frame towards the centre of the left edge. Inspection under raking light reveals a few minor scratches to the plexiglass in a few places.
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Captured from a birds-eye view, Andreas Gursky’s monumental Rimini depicts the popular beach resort in Northern Italy. Consuming the viewer owing to the sheer scale of Gursky’s print, this epic photographic panorama subtly manipulates perspective, and therein photography’s claim to documentary objectivity, to confer an overwhelming and impossibly omniscient visual encounter. Underlined by his own brief manifesto, “I pursue one goal – the encyclopaedia of life”, Gursky’s photograph captures the landscape of our modern world, reflecting and representing contemporary life and mass society (Andreas Gursky cited in: Helga Meister, ‘Fotografisches Lexicon des Lebens’, West-deutsche Zeitung, 3 May 2001, p. 20). Indeed, within the sweeping vista of Rimini’s crowded Italian coastline, Gursky broadcasts how humanity has adjusted to the rise of globalisation.

Via a pictorial interweave of microstructure and enveloping macroscopic detail, the colourful shoreline of Rimini is displayed in full glory. With an extreme depth of field the work’s unique perspective creates the illusion of infinity as the shore snakes off into the distance. Thousands of parasols cover the sandy beach in a pointillist pattern of primary colour, while minute specks of crystal clear detail capture swimmers, lifeguards, and sunbathers. In the top left corner the town’s high-rises and beachfront hotels demarcate the edges of an overbuilt coastal strip – a perfect paradigm of our modern civilised world in which man continues to assert his physical power over nature. Having photographed this scene from a distance and from many angles, Gursky manipulated his pictorial data to establish a unique vantage point from which he has captured the infinitesimal details of our globalised society in one crisp and utterly engrossing image.

Gursky’s supreme command of the photographic medium can be traced back to his days at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where he studied under the tutelage of renowned photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. One can look as far back as 1984 to Gursky’s work Klausenpass, a work that Peter Galassi has cited as crucial in his development as an artist. Galassi reveals that six months after taking the photograph at the request of a companion, "[Gursky] was excited to find scattered across the landscape the tiny figures of hikers whose presence the photographer, unlike his camera, had failed to register at the time” (Peter Galassi, ‘Gursky’s World’ in: Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Andreas Gursky, 2001, p. 22). It was through this apparent ‘accident’ that Gursky discovered one of the most rewarding aspects of photography; the delectation of details too small and too incidental to have been noticed by the human eye.

Delivering one of Gursky’s most conceptually powerful treatments of the photographic medium, Rimini presents us with an outstanding vision in the artist’s iconic visual language. Monumental, not only in its immediate presence, but also in its formal dialogue, epic scale, and faultless clarity, Rimini stretches the concept of photography to its outermost limit. Ultimately, the undercurrent of social documentation encapsulates art historian, Hans Irrek’s statement that Gursky’s work “offers us the rare opportunity to follow an approach whose intention is nothing less than to find the one, universal image that contains in compressed form all the values of civilized existence” (Hans Irrek, ‘Fragmente einer Weltsicht’, in: Exh. Cat., Frankfurt, Portikus Frankfurt am Main, Andreas Gursky, Montparnasse, 1995, p. 8).