Name: ANDREAS GURSKY (B. 1955)
Brand: Düsseldorf Flughafen I
Price: 28000.00 GBP
Availability: OutOfStock

ANDREAS GURSKY (B. 1955)
Düsseldorf Flughafen I
signed, titled, numbered and dated 'Düsseldorf Flughafen I, '85 10/10 A. Gursky' (on the reverse)
C-print, in artist's frame
overall: 56⁷⁄₈ x 49in. (144.5 x 124.4cm.)
Executed in 1985, this work is number ten from an edition of ten

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2001.

Hamburg, Deichtorhallen, Andreas Gursky: Photographs 1984-1993, 1994, p. 124 (another version exhibited, illustrated in colour, p. 23). This exhibition later travelled to Amsterdam, De Appel Foundation.

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Lot Essay

Spanning over a metre in both height and width, Andreas Gursky’s Düsseldorf Flughafen I (1985) offers a panorama of human spectacle.A split-second preserved in time, the scene fluctuates between the intoxicating details of uplifted heads and gesticulating hands and the throng of a crowd functioning as one. Gursky has been praised for the cinematic scope of his photographs, a sense underscored by the theatrical drama to which his figures succumb and the ways in which he plays with perspective to suggest a crescendo of human emotion. At their best, his photographs reveal the ‘essence of modernity in scenes of spectacular visual plenitude’ (K. Johnson, ‘ART IN REVIEW; Andreas Gursky’, New York Times, 31 December 1999, p. E43). In Düsseldorf Flughafen I, every emotion, every gesture, is caught with a dazzling specificity; the work speaks to the ‘pure joy of seeing’ (A. Gursky, https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/art-exhibitions/andreas-gursky). Düsseldorf Flughafen I is part of an edition of ten and was shown in the artist’s 1994 exhibition Andreas Gursky-Fotografien 1984-1993, at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, and the De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam.

Gursky was born in Leipzig but moved to Düsseldorf when he was one year old. There, his father set up a successful commercial photography studio, so the young Gursky grew up surrounded by camera equipment. He was at first uninterested in following his father professionally, but he eventually enrolled in the Folkwang University of the Arts, where he studied photography. He went on to study at Düsseldorf’s Künstakademie, and Düsseldorf Flughafen I was taken while Gursky was still a student; there he studied under the celebrated photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. The Bechers’ seemingly dispassionate images of architectural archetypes informed Gursky’s bourgeoning practice, and he too embraced a documentary aesthetic. Turning an impassive lens onto the airport’s crowd of onlookers, Düsseldorf Flughafen I foretells the artist’s unique aesthetic which renders life’s details abstract. Although his images are overwhelmed with information, the effect is one of opacity in which any individual narrative is overtly refused. ‘I stand at a distance,’ Gursky has noted, ‘like a person who comes from another world. I just record what I see’ (A. Gursky interviewed by C. Squiers, ‘Concrete Reality’, Ruhr Works, September 1988, p. 29).