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Andreas Gursky’s pictorial world has exerted a strong fascination ever since his works became better known to a wider audience at the beginning of the 90s, making both him and his style famous. This fascination is thanks in the main to the amazingly simple procedure of viewing the individual elements in close-up and the classical change of viewing perspective, which, in the sum of the parts, adds up to a truly powerful compositional visual impression.

Other characteristics can be singled out, too, for example the pictorial nature of transitory procedures that reveals in particular, an essence akin to a sign of the times in Gursky’s works. No other artist working in the field of photography has been able to present – even in his early works – such a bold interplay of different optical and semantic worlds. Whether is be Nike trainers arranged like a sculpture on shelves for example, whose presentation en masse and in strict geometrical order is a minimalist act in its own right, or such apparently inconspicuous subjects such as the Rhine near Düsseldorf, in which absence itself is represented. In his recent works and by means his very own pictorial language, he shows the cosmos of a familiar and yet unlived exoticism, of the supposedly globally accessible sign.

For the first time since 1998 there is a comprehensive presentation in Germany of Andreas Gursky’s work; the catalogue, complete with a series of images selected and compiled by the artist himself, is the first publication since Gursky’s major solo exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.