ANDREAS GURSKY | Beijing

Sprüth Magers, Berlin
Acquired from the above by the present owner

London, Hayward Gallery, Andreas Gursky, January - April 2018 (another edition exhibited)

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly deeper in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals some faint scratches and scuffs to the wooden frame and Plexiglas in isolated places.
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Executed on a monumental scale, Beijing is an endlessly intriguing and engaging depiction of the interior of Beijing’s national stadium – also known as the Bird’s Nest – by renowned German photographer Andreas Gursky. The building was designed for the Beijing’s Olympic Games of 2008 by Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, as well as the Chinese artist, architect and activist Ai Weiwei. The Bird’s Nest is a spectacular and awe-inspiring piece of architecture comprising endless interlocking beams. Characterised by visually spectacular images that merge impressively large structures with incredible detail, Gursky’s imposing photographic images range in subject from stock exchanges and formula-one circuits, through to hotel atriums and social housing. Indeed, many of the artist’s most famous works explore the physical and abstract spaces of contemporary society and our relationship with them. As perfectly exemplified in Beijing, Gursky’s interest in architecture is not merely an aesthetic concern: although the visual power of his work is undeniable, it demonstrates an equally strong interest in the philosophical implications of spatial design. Beijing masterfully draws upon Gursky’s oeuvre of large-scale representations while bringing complex architecture and the relationship between the building’s interior and exterior spaces to the foreground. This allows him to project an essence of monumentality and scale of the building, and to impress in a single image the building’s name: Bird’s Nest. By creating an illusion similar to the nest-like structure, Gursky confronts the openness of the structure but at the same time amplifies the density of the beams and the stifling, enclosed, nest-like atmosphere. Beijing is a photograph that is drawn from his early works of empty, muted landscapes and architectural compositions that complements and completes the artist’s representations.

One of the most influential photographic image-makers of our age, Gursky first acquired his conceptual approach to the medium from Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie. Despite the more lyrical aesthetic of Gursky’s oeuvre, there is an underlying theoretical concern that is not dissimilar to that of his teachers. Where the Bechers’ typologies captured the remnants of an industrial Germany, Gursky’s work could be considered as an index of the post-industrial era. Characterised by overwhelmingly spectacular spaces in which large, abstract structures are contrasted with the presence of small, distant human beings, Gursky’s work constitutes an aesthetic equivalent for the Twenty-first Century. The fact that many of his works have been digitally manipulated is highly relevant, as Gursky’s photographs often convey the abstract influences driving our globalised, post-industrial world that do not necessarily relate to a physical space. Accordingly, Beijing proposes a unique experience of the interior space that is a compound construction, exposing both architectural balance and artistic virtue.