Andreas Gursky at Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art begins the exhibition year 2012 with a presentation of one of the most pace-setting photographers today, Andreas Gursky (b. 1955 in Leipzig and living in Düsseldorf). Gursky is a visual artist before he is a photographer. Photography and the incredible programs of the computer are the means of creating images that are about something, images that work. Precisely by flirting fundamentally with the possible truth of the image and then bringing it into play in an overarching manoeuvre, Gursky is able to insist on the necessity of the artistic image in our continuing efforts to recognize the world we live in. Gursky’s photographs are visual art, Gurksy’s visual art is photography when it is most captivating and almost dizzyingly real – that is, unrealistically real.

The exhibition deals with photography and its boundaries. Many of Gursky’s pictures come close to the painterly, others appear highly photographic. With 45 of the artist’s mega-photographs and about 26 smaller photographs, Louisiana’s exhibition spans all of Gursky’s output right up to the very latest photographs that were presented at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, in the autumn of 2011. The exhibition thus gives the viewer the opportunity to follow the transformations and transformative power of the pictures over more than two decades. Gursky is an artist of the individual work – but over the last two years he has produced two series, Ocean, 2010, of which Ocean I and III are on show in the exhibition, and in 2011 another series of brand new works with the overall title Bangkok, six of which are included in the exhibition. This is the first time these photographs have been shown in a museum, or indeed in Europe at all.

The exhibition is curated by the director of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Poul Erik Tøjner, in close dialogue with the artist.

Andreas Gursky
Exhibition
Until May 13,i 2012
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Humlebæk, Danmark


Images:
F1 Boxenstopp I
Madonna
Nha Trang
Ocean II
Bangkok V

All Images © Andreas Gursky, VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn.
Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London