Andreas Gursky

Dirimart, Istanbul
Private Collection, Turkey
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is very slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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Presented in the imposing format and compositional clarity that characterise the aesthetics of Andreas Gursky’s distinguished oeuvre, Bangkok IV also embodies the central theoretical tenets of the artist’s practice: a dialogue between abstraction and figuration; art-historical references that point to an engagement with the medium-specificity of photography vis-à-vis painting; the effects of globalisation and the emergence of a postmodern sublime; and the placelessness of digitally constructed spaces as representations of an increasingly abstract world. For all the seductive appearances of the shimmering surface of the Still-like blackness that represents the Chao Phraya river, this mysterious rendering of Thailand’s 370km long river reveals the mastery with which Gursky turns the everyday into impressive representations of his ‘encyclopaedia of life’.

When looking at the Bangkok series, comparisons to abstract painting immediately spring to mind: the work of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman effortlessly lend themselves as painterly parallels to Gursky’s abstracted rendering of the Chao Phraya river. Andreas Gursky started working at a time when photography had yet to assert itself as an autonomous artistic medium - a battle which the artist and his contemporaries of the Dusseldorf School of Photography fought through their conceptual approach to subject-matter, and which was helped by the technological advances that made it possible to produce photographs on the same scale of paintings. From the very beginning, Gursky has therefore engaged with the relationship between photography and painting, which has become a central concern in his oeuvre.

In Bangkok IV, this dialectic between the two mediums is perfectly demonstrated, as Gursky amalgamates two important philosophical truth-claims of art: the indexicality argument of photography, or the notion that the photograph is a truthful representation of reality, and the truth-claim of abstract painting, which, lacking an external referent and only referencing its own existence, considers itself the purest form of art. By using the medium of photography for what was once considered a quintessentially painterly practice, Gursky cleverly undermines such medium-specific claims, at once revealing the subjectivity of photography and the potential for abstraction outside the medium of painting.

Besides the self-referential nature of the Bangkok series, subtly interspersed details of trash floating on the river and strange patches of colour also point to another central concern in Gursky’s work: the effects of globalisation, which in this case might be understood as pollution. The notion of the sublime has often been used to describe Gursky’s worrying yet beautiful images - but the sublime here is distinctly postmodern: no longer is this simultaneous experience of beauty and anxiety caused by the realisation of man’s futility in the face of nature, but towards the technological apparatus that mankind itself has produced - which in Gursky’s work is represented by the effects of globalisation. Driven by his mastery of digital image-manipulation, specific places such as the Chao Phraya river are presented in abstracted form, and their lack of site-specificity symbolises the abstract globalised world we live in: both the image and the pollution could be found anywhere in the world. In this amalgamation of formal concerns, art-historical references, medium-specificity, and the effects of globalisation, Bangkok IV summarises the central concerns of Andreas Gursky’s influential practice with extreme clarity.