Andreas Gursky

German artist Andreas Gursky is best known for his billboard-size photographs that inhabit a space between painting and photography, landscape and human concern, animate and inanimate. He often places his large-format camera at a high-angled distance from his subject, creating images that suggest mapping stills from outer space or cyber-technology. Sometimes computer manipulated, his images of corporate architecture, environmental contemplations such as pebbly earth, and mass groups of people freeze-framed mid-motion often reference the geometric forms of Minimalist Art and the "allover" quality of a Jackson Pollock painting. Our eyes dance across his dense, often slightly abstracted images, which display strong formal elements as they blend relationships between nature, culture, and technology. He is particularly concerned with capturing motion and creating a moment of stillness in that space. His work is "as much akin to the physics of motion as it is to the philosophy of convergence." Let's Entertain features a large photograph of a mass of youthful partygoers titled May Day III. This hazy, overcast image evokes film stills, apocalyptic imaginings, mass demonstration news documents, and other associations from our collective consciousness. One critic commented that Gursky's images "depict social and geographical stresspoints... involve people who are drawn into a kind of geographical or social unity, if an imperfect one." This mass gathering of ravers suggests that some of us are caught in a moment when cultural tropes such as music present the only viable and desirable opportunity for collective engagement. Politics has been usurped by culture and identities are formed through these moments of common ecstatic abandon. Through highly dramatic means, Gursky at once documents and remaps this party as an instance of promise, failure, confusion, and hope.