Mülheim a. d. Ruhr, Sonntagsspaziergänger

Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky’s imposing, large-scale photographs capture contemporary society’s excess and information overload. The artist shoots his vibrant, highly detailed images—of supermarkets, landscapes, architecture, and crowds, for example—from a high angle, then digitally manipulates his frames to highlight patterns and the glut of details. Gursky studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and honed his photographic practice under Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose repetitive “typologies” of industrial buildings and structures informed Gursky’s own focus on the inherent “sameness” of modern life. His work has been exhibited in cities including London, New York, Paris, Zürich, Berlin, and Beijing and belongs in the collections of the Broad Art Foundation, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, and Tate Modern, among others. In 2011, Gursky’s photograph Rhein II (1999) set the record for the most expensive photograph ever sold when it achieved more than $4 million at auction.