About the Work
Siedlung Essen was taken in Essen, Germany, where Andreas Gursky spent two years studying at the Folkswangschule. It was in Essen that Gursky encountered documentary photography and the art of unbiased observation. In this photograph of a siedlung, an estate or settlement, Gursky captures a moment in time: a couple in walking away from the viewer on a path well-traveled with no implied destination or narrative.
About the Artist
Since the late 1980s, German artist Andreas Gursky has produced large-scale epic photographs focused on the impact of globalization on contemporary landscapes and architecture. His use of digital processing to achieve scale is seen as innovative and provocative. His 1999 photograph, 99 cent 11 diptychon sold for $3.3 million in 2007, then the highest auction price for a single photograph. His now iconic photographic style defines the genre of contemporary landscape painting.
Like Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer before him, Gursky, in the early 1980s attended the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf with an extraordinary group of students including Thomas Struth. They went on to define contemporary German art in the 1990s with a focus on media. Durksy shifted from documentary photographs to large-format color photography, which permits him to engage in a world’s eye point of view. His work is in the collections of Eli Broad and Bernard Arnault as well as the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou.
