The photographs of the Bahrain series feature the Formula 1 racetrack in the Bahrain desert. Gursky used photographic plates to take overhead shots of a landscape deeply transformed by human intervention and then a computer to break down the images and reassemble them in a new and different form with the sequence of the individual parts altered. The results are compositions that recall abstract painting. The elements of reality still present – such as the logo of a well-known mobile telephone company – serve to bring the photographs back into the here and now of a society distinguished by the ubiquity of trademarks.
Andreas Gursky is the most illustrious representative of a generation of photographers who draw inspiration from the stylistic principles of painting and regard digital processing as an indispensable stage of image configuration. He accords artistic and compositional requirements priority over realism with respect to the dimensions of the individual elements, reorganizing details, increasing the height of buildings, swelling the crowds and recasting the landscapes. For Andreas Gursky, the photographic image is the raw material of a complex operation from which the final image emerges. His photographs are thus a sort of aesthetic abstraction of a reality that – as he puts it – does not exist as such but only as a construct. Together with other celebrated photographers like Jörg Sasse, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer and Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky was a pupil of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. His 99 Cent II, Diptych was sold at an auction in 2007 for $3.3 million, the highest price ever paid for a photograph.

Andreas Gursky (Germany, 1955)

Andreas Gursky is interested in themes and developments connected with the globalized modern world, the pop and consumer culture, architecture and human intervention in nature as well as the relationship of the anonymous individual to mass phenomena. The artist takes a neutral, detached view of his subjects, often adopting an elevated vantage point comparable to that of the omniscient narrator in literature. The results are photographs that are staggering in terms of scale and precision of image but mostly devoid of any central subject.