Présentation
Sous la direction de Ralf Beil et Sonja Feßel
Andreas Gursky. Architecture

Extrait de «Just what is it that makes Gursky's photos so différent, so appealing? On Andreas Gursky's pictorial strategy and the emblematic nature of his architectural photographs» par Ralf Beil

«Andreas Gursky's monumental photographs: the media nowadays uses them as eye-catchers; avant-garde scholars use them as pictorial arguments to strengthen their thrust when diagnosing today. His works precisely reflect the spirit of the age.

But what is it that makes them what they are? And makes them so différent? What is it that makes them important, given the tremendous amount of image data available in an "age of total visual control of space", when the entire world has become accessible as a visual navigational space, in a moment in history when we can access image after image on any random buzzword in an instant, using Google Images?

Andreas Gursky is considered a "superstar of global photo art" and was until recently "the world's most expensive living photo artist" to cite but two of the forceful honorary titles the media have conferred on him. And he certainly seems to be more than familiar with the right recipe for generating meaning. Constantly hunting down the presence of our fundamentally urbanized planet, he is sometimes clearly ahead of his times.

In 1992 he took his Cairo, Diptych of a crossroads in the Egyptian capital from a bird's-eye perspective — Google Earth avant Google Earth — and assigned it far greater power as an image and depth of focus than current satellite images on the Internet. While the anthropological question of the Google Earth generation would appear to be a decidedly unmetaphysical "Where am I?", Gursky's striking focuses on the spaces in which we live continue to ask: "What are we? Why are we? And what does all this around us do to us?»

Une exposition éponyme est organisée à l'Institut Mathildenhöhe de Darmstadt du 11 mai au 7 septembre 2008.

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