Constructing Reality

December 11, 2017

The Gagosian Gallery in Rome is pleased to present the exhibition ‘Bangkok’ by Andreas Gursky, open from 14 December 2017 to 2 March 2018.
From 14 December 2017 to 2 March 2018, images by Andreas Gursky will be on display at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome – making it the first Italian venue to present the renowned German artist’s work.

The show comprises photographs from the series Bangkok (2011) and Ocean VI (2010). Gursky’s work, which is created both digitally and with analogue equipment, appears at once orderly and complex in its composition. The distilled patterns and symmetries in his images subtly draw our attention to an individually formulated world. According to the artist, “the only way to convey reality is to construct it.”

In Gursky’s series Bangkok, Thailand’s capital is unrecognisable: no palace, no Buddha – just endless water with luminous ripples and reflections of light. This is how he captured the Chao Phraya – as a heavy body of water that moves through Bangkok and seems to have metaphorically absorbed the city into its depths. Like many urban rivers, it is filled with the debris of civilisation. Yet the artist captures them – branches, waste, a car tire, a used condom, pages of a newspaper, flower petals – not as a maelstrom, but as isolated fragments.

The series Ocean VI is dedicated to the Pacific. It forms part of a larger project on the topic: for the first time, the artist used not his own photographs, but satellite images as a basis for the resulting images.

For further information visit Galerie Gagosian and Andreas Gursky
 

Constructing Reality