Andreas Gursky German, 1955

Andreas Gursky (Leipzig, Germany 1955)

Andreas Gursky attended the Folkwangschule in Essen from 1978 to 1980. At the suggestion of Thomas Struth, he enrolled at the renowned art academy in Düsseldorf and attended Bernd and Hilla Becher's photography class, which was groundbreaking for him and many other photo artists. From 1985, he was also a master student of Bernd Becher.

From the very beginning, he was interested in architecture, interiors and landscapes, which he initially developed in the 1980s in small-format, serial photographs in a documentary style. It was not until the 1990s that he turned his attention to extreme large formats, whose motifs usually show large gatherings of people, which he deliberately staged and digitally processed.

He helped photography to be recognised as an artistically independent form of expression by exploring zeitgeist phenomena and creating condensed testimonies of the present.

The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (in 1998), New York Museum of Modern Art (in 2001) and Centre Pompidou (in 2002) dedicated a retrospective to him.

Gursky's works can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and London's Tate Modern.

He has been a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy since 2010 and a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts since 2012. Gursky has received numerous honours, including the Kaiserring of the city of Goslar in 2008 and the "Berliner Bär" cultural award in 2009.

Copyright the artist. Photo UniCredit Group