Andreas Gursky

Galerie Mai 36, Zürich
Private Collection, Switzerland

Exhibition Catalogue, Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle, Andreas Gursky: Photographs from 1984 to the Present, 1998, p. 81, illustration of another example in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Andreas Gursky, 2001, p. 129, illustration of another example in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the race course and grass are less saturated in tone in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals two minute media accretions towards the top left edge and a small spot in the sky above the building on the far left. There are a couple of irregularities to the surface of the print inherent to the artist's working process and original to the work's execution.
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Executed in 1994, Sha Tin is one of Andreas Gursky's most subtly complex and most highly considered photographs, encapsulating in its rigorous composition and rich matrix of detail much of what makes this artist the leading light of his generation. Another version of this famous image graces the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Ostensibly an image of Hong Kong's premier race track, it is simultaneously a layered manifesto on Gursky's unique photographic aesthetic. By choosing to depict horse racing, Gursky confronts head on one of the enduring motifs of landscape painting, spanning the Ancient Roman depictions of the games to the British masters of equine art and Theodore Gericault, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas in the Nineteenth century. But Gursky's skill here resides in his ability to transform this traditional genre into a vitrine of contemporaneity and a vehicle for expressing his quintessentially post-modern concerns.

 

The analogy to painting is an important one, for Gursky is the key protagonist in establishing parity between photography and painting in contemporary art practice. Here, the sweeping horizon line is an open emulation of the compositional devices of classical painting. Like Caspar David Friedrich, he creates amazing force through a commanding pictorial scaffold which, when scrutinised, reveals the incredible premeditation and control that goes into Gursky's image-making. The lower two-thirds of the composition are made up of receding horizontal bands – the two rows of spectators, the turf, the railings, the hedgerows, the central parkland and the far side of the track – everything is orchestrated to emphasise the horizontal sweep of this monumental image, encouraging the eye to rove from side to side analysing the detail. While traditional landscape painting provided receding, often winding perspective to lead the eye into the distance, foreground and background are here flattened and compressed by Gursky's lens. In this image full of internal correspondences, the grids of windows in the tower blocks rising in the background are echoed by the dot matrix screen indicating the betting odds in the foreground. Friedrich deployed such breathtaking devices to illustrate the divine order of existence; Gursky, on the other hand, uses similar techniques to expose the subconscious order that permeates contemporary society. While Friedrich shows the beauty of nature, Gursky shows the intrinsic beauty of our own manmade environment, the containers within which we lead our existence.  On the one hand the open spaces of the Sha Tin race track, built on an artificial, man-made promontory; on the other compartmentalised apartment buildings in which we cocoon ourselves in daily living, nowhere more so than in Hong Kong. In the far distance, the forested hillside offers a glimpse of the natural environment of the landscape paintings of yore.

 

Gursky's engagement with art history does not end with the masters of landscape painting. His efforts to reduce everything to its essence resembles the constructivist approach to early abstraction and in Sha Tin we get an early sense of his delight in the ravishing purities of Minimalism. As Peter Galassi explains, "Behind Gursky's taste for the imposing clarity of unbroken parallel forms spanning a slender rectangle lies a rich inheritance of reductivist aesthetics, from Friedrich to Newman to Richter to Donald Judd" (Peter Galassi, 'Gursky's World' in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Andreas Gursky, 2001, p.35). Indeed, in Sha Tin the pristine green strip which horizontally bisects the picture plane – in which every divot is visible – is the blueprint for one of Gursky's most iconic works, Rhine, which he made two years later. In that work, all peripheral detail is airbrushed out of the image by careful digital manipulation, leaving nothing but the minimalist ribbons on grass, water and sky. Sha Tin, incredibly, predates Gursky's use of digital manipulation to heighten his images, but we nonetheless experience this same minimalist purity.