Deutscher and Hackett

Andreas Gursky creates resplendent photographic tableaux of landscapes and industrial vistas, reproduced in sharp detail and large scale. Living and working in Dusseldorf, Gursky is from a generation of young artists who learnt a conceptual style of documentary photography from Bernd and Hilla Becher (including Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Axel Hütte and Candida Höffer). Applying their principles of clarity and dispassion, Gursky takes photographs that translate real landscapes into almost immersive formalist artworks, revelling in pattern and minute detail. Since 1990, Gursky has used digital technologies to stitch together details from multiple photographs to create his pictures. This triptych of photographs is rare in both its domestic scale, and for the immediacy with which they were created. These photographs were taken with an analogue camera in the Victorian Alpine National Park, while Gursky was in Australia opening his solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in November 2008. The spectacular and immersive vistas of Victoria’s high country are printed here on a modest scale, coupled with an image of a construction site, where strong sunlight across a timber structure creates a patterned surface. These photographs retain Gursky’s predilection for sharp detail, impersonal distance and his distinctly Germanic understanding of the sublime

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH