2001 Infinity Award: Art

Andreas Gursky is known for his ambitious work depicting the landscape of the modern world. He makes color photographs of such sites as hotels, warehouses, and parliaments, proliferating with detail, which are sometimes as wide as 16 feet. Juror Mark Haworth-Booth writes, “His large-scale photographs describe many of the major defining sites of the contemporary world—the complexities of architectural design for mass-housing and hotels, the spectacle of financial markets and of youth raves, of high-end consumerism and of bleak modern ways.” His frequent use of digital manipulation places him at the forefront of current practices in photography.

Gursky was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1955, and studied at the Kunstakacademie in Dusseldorf under master photographer Bernd Becher. First exhibited in Munich in 1985, he was quickly acknowledged internationally in such places as New York, Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. The Matthew Marks Gallery in New York and Monica Spruth in Cologne represent him. In March the first major American exhibition of his work opened at the Museum of Modern Art with an accompanying catalogue by Peter Galassi. Of that exhibition, Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times wrote, “The ultimate complement to any exhibition is to say that the rest of the world looks different after you leave the show. That’s certainly the case with Mr. Gursky’s mid-career overview...The world suddenly becomes drab by comparison. Drab and tiny.”