6L
Andreas Gursky
Gasherd (Gas cooker)
Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery, New York
© Andreas Gursky/ARS, 2013; 2008 Andreas Gursky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, Germany; Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Monika Spruth/Philomene Magers, Cologne/Munich
German artist Andreas Gursky has built a career on stark, visually arresting photographs that spotlight the man-made environment. The crispness of his images and intense color saturation give his compositions a mesmerizing allure, and the large scale of his prints permits viewers to be absorbed by his dazzling displays. His photograph Gasherd was his first published picture, and it still stands as a brilliant example of the artist's ability to elevate mundane subject matter with hypnotic ease.
The subject of a traveling retrospective organized by New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2001, Gursky's work is an important — and expanding — component of SFMOMA's world-renowned photography collection, and is included in the collections of Tate in Britain, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
