Andreas Gursky

White Cube Bermondsey presents an exhibition by Andreas Gursky featuring new and recent photographs. Produced over the past four years, these works reflect Gursky’s focus on the ‘essential commonality’ of contemporary life and the forms and structures of global capitalism.

Gursky’s subjects – from multinational headquarters to fashion runways, a domestic interior to a political seminar – take on a scale akin to that of history painting. In so doing, Gursky gives spatial precedence to the pressing issues of our age, articulated through expansive scenes that reveal their pictorial complexity. In his new photographs, the artist elaborates upon the role of images in today’s society, addressing the paradoxical nature of the medium and its relationship to the real. As Gursky states: ‘Seeing and the imperative to find images leads me to my subjects, not the other way round.’
Several of the works in the exhibition revisit sites of earlier photographs, including the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank and the Rhine River. The resulting images appear to harness timescales and reflect accelerated political and ecological change.