Surrealism - Image #2
Andreas Gursky - http://www.andreasgursky.com/en
IMAGE: Stacking, color blocking, old, transparent, vague, graphic, geometric, urbanization, overpopulation, suffocation, lines, boxes
MEANING: Andreas Gursky is an artist that likes to photographer most stock exchanges, concert areas, big box stores, sweeping landscapes, racetracks, and other locations, which engage in regular relationship with the human population. His monumental photographs of these environments have the effect of fully encompassing the viewer within the spaces they aim to portray.Gursky's photographs are often shot from an elevated, aerial perspective. This allows viewers to experience a scene in its full proportions, which would ordinarily be impossible, allowing for a visual comprehension of scope, center, and periphery. A straightforward and distanced observation informs Gursky's work, leaving us to formulate our own opinions and responses. We recognize his world as our own rather than one adorned with any personal messaging. Aggregate space performs largely in the success of each work. Even though his subject matter exists prior to his encounter with it, he manages to masterfully reveal its inherently harmonious sum of individual parts where objects become elements such as strata, line, geometry, color, and form.Gursky's photographs create a dialogue between painting and representation in that they go beyond merely capturing a piece of visual documentation - they in fact oftentimes conjure the look and feel borrowed from such movements as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Although Gursky refrains from social or political commentary with his work, he admits an overriding interest in capturing the existence of globalism and consumerism as it relates to modern man.