
If I had some extra cash lying around I would probably take a quick weekend trip up to Vancouver just to see all the crazy stuff going on at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
I guess it’s not enough to have exhibitions of Vermeer, Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art, Anthony Hernandez and Stan Douglas: Klatsassin, but they also have the must see Andreas Gursky: Werke/Works 80-08.
I almost saw this Gursky exhibition last November at the Kunstmuseen in Krefeld, Germany but decided it was too off the beaten path to make any sense. I completely regret not going as it seems to be a very unique way of seeing Gursky’s photographs.
The main idea behind the exhibition was to show as much of Gursky’s photographs as possible in one place at one time. The only way to physically accomplish this was to scale down the photographs to a more manageable size. Gursky himself decided to make new small prints of over 130 of his photographs, including some that have never been seen before from his early days.
A catalogue was published to coincide with the exhibition and now that I have it, I can honestly say that it’s the best and only Gursky book I need on my shelf.
Who ever said that just because the objects on the wall or in the gallery are over-sized that the book needed to be over-sized as well? I don’t see Richard Serra making gigantic books.
I’m getting kind of tired of the inflated book size that you can’t even pick up let alone carry around. That Richard Misrach On the Beach book that I got all excited about, it’s been sitting above my wardrobe cabinet in the same cardboard box it arrived in for pretty much the entire time I’ve had it.
I now plan to sell my Gursky MoMA catalogue as it’s just taking up too much room on my shelf and I never really liked it that much anyway.
The Werke/Works 80-08 book is organized chronlogically beginning with Gas Cooker from 1980 and ending with Dubai World III from 2008. In between we get all the photographs that Gursky made his reputation on as well as many photographs most people have never seen before. Being able to see the entire evolution of Gursky’s vision up until now is an eye opening experience to say the least. One can really see Gursky wearing his influences and education on his sleeves while at the same time beginning to move the medium along in his own unique way. We see the successes but we also see the sidetracks and failures. The book even includes the completely fabricated and totally insane Hauptversammlung, Diptychon completed in 2001 just in time for Gursky’s retrospective at MoMA.
All the photographs are printed small as the book is oriented vertically and is only about 8 x 10 inches. What the book makes me appreciate even more is the greatness of the photography behind the large scale prints. Sometimes looking at enormous photographs hanging on a wall can be a total distraction whereby I get carried away by the scale and lose focus on the image. Here in this size (and I assume in the exhibition) the photographs are all about the image and not about the scale. Something about the size of the images makes me want to look more, not less. As if I have to search out the tiny details to understand what it is that I am seeing.
It would be wonderful if this exhibition could get an American venue but there doesn’t seem to be anything planned. Part of me hopes that the experience of making smaller scaled prints has re-awakened something inside Gursky and will possibly bring him to a new place with his future work. We’ll have to wait and see but until then I’ll continue to enjoy the small scale images in this wonderful book.
As a side note, I’m not surprised that while the exhibition traveled to Stockholm, Gurksy selected Blade Runner for a public screening.
Further Reading:
DLK Collection
Syndrome Stockholm