PHOTO:Andreas Gursky -Not Abstract II
On his recent works, Andreas Gursky explores the abstract potential of the photographic medium. From early in his career, abstraction has served Gursky as a resource for compositional freedom, and in his view, establishes the closest possible proximity between painting and photography.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery & Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive
“Not Abstract II,” is an exhibition of recent photographs by Andreas Gursky, accompanied by an minimalist sound installation by Canadian DJ and producer Richie Hawtin. Both Gursky and Hawtin use digital technology in image and sound respectively, to recombine the materials of everyday existence. Their collaboration brings all of the senses together, positioning politics, capitalism, and geography within a hypnotic realm that oscillates between abstraction and reality. Andreas Gursky presents studies or rather simulations of abstract compositions in the vein of American postwar artists including: Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. Many of Gursky’s photographs resemble abstract compositions from afar, only revealing their documentary nature under closer scrutiny. This effect is especially impressive with his latest series of tulip fields photographed from a great distance, the illusion seems almost perfect here. In “Les Meés” (2016), solar panels, rolling hills, and a gray-blue sky become bold areas of color, as opposed to elements in a landscape. Hawtin’s minimalist techno soundscape, composed in response to Gursky’s art, ‘breathes’ with the photographs, inspiring longer pauses that allow each image to expand beyond its frame. In several untitled works never before exhibited in the U.S.A., Gursky takes this effect a step further; aerial views of tulip fields tip the landscape up and create homogeny from variety, the colors blend together to form horizontal bands, like sheet music filled in with impressionist hues. However, according to him, these photographs are not abstract, because abstraction is unrecognizable. From afar they appear as ambiguous geometries and gradients, but a step closer and a refocusing of the eye reveals their content. Once the tulips are recognized as such, there is no returning to abstraction. Thus Gursky offers up the threshold of abstraction, just in time to make it disappear. The tulip fields find their consumerist equivalent in “Mediamarkt” (2016) and “Amazon” (2016). The products become mosaic depictions of spaces that seem too big to comprehend. Gursky is able to foster this sense of the quotidian sublime in both scale and content in meditations on the Romantic genre deftly attuned to contemporary times.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, New York, Duration 10/11-23/12/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com
