ANDREAS GURSKY (B. 1955)

"Andreas Gursky observes the human species in and out of doors as if through the eyes of an 'extraterrestrial being.' Magnetically attracted by the frequently paradoxical phenomenology of the structures and patterns that people invent for themselves, he stalks our planet, meeting up with unsuspecting and unsuspected images... The outcome reveals this 'extraterrestrial' to be an artist undeniably enmeshed in the tradition and history of art in the Western world, both figurative and abstract, and deeply indebted to the documentary realism of his teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher. The presence of Brueghel, Jan Vermeer, Adolf Menzel, the German Romantic painters, Jackson Pollock, even Matisse, and others is variously felt in Gursky's socially oriented photographs... Whether it is a landscape in which people-always small and never foregrounded-move in groups or in crowds each picture functions as an independent unity, not as part of a series, and thereby radiates a self-contained aura that never ceases to elicit astonishment" (J. Burckhardt, "Andreas Gursky: Painter of New Theaters of Action," Parkett, No. 44, 1995, pp. 74-75.)