Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky's large-scale color photographs of landscapes, buildings, and masses of people have been likened to paintings. Gursky studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1980s, where he honed his fascination with the ways people live in the world and how their existence impacts their surroundings. In the early 1990s he began using digital tools to heighten formal elements and circumvent the limits of perspective in his pictures.

Gursky (born 1955) first exhibited his work at Matthew Marks Gallery in 1997. The exhibition included 12 large-scale photographs, among them Rhein, a signature work. He has exhibited throughout Europe and the United States, and his work was the subject of a retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2001, which toured extensively. The Kunstmuseum Basel mounted a major Gursky exhibition, and the Haus der Kunst Munich organized a traveling exhibition of works made by the artist between 1987 and 2007. The Vancouver Art Gallery, the Moderna Museet Stockholm, and the Kunstmuseen Krefeld jointly organized an exhibition of Gursky's work made between 1980 to 2008. Gursky lives and works in Düsseldorf.