"Moscow News", #17-18 2008 (8th of May, 2008)

Exhibitions - Andreas Gursky

Not all that many photographers have a truly distinctive style, as while the medium is extremely flexible there's only so much you can do when it comes to technique. Style presents many more options, but it's still hard to find a combination of the two to attain a signature look. Gursky, has got it all worked out.

Andreas Gursky's photographs are immediately recognizable: in the vast majority of his shots the viewers are astounded by the feeling of enormous, practically infinite space before them. Gursky tends to pick fairly mundane topics - hundreds of cows, endless aisles in supermarkets, thousands of identical umbrellas stretched out along a beach that has no beginning or end - but he picks such angles that the numbers of what we usually see in everyday life seem to multiply a million times. Together with the usually huge size of the prints, the effect is staggering. The countless subjects and objects simply lose their meaning, and instead come together to form a bright, kaleidoscopic texture, sometimes reminiscent of Tibetan mandalas.