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| Andreas Gursky 99 Cent chromogenic print face-mounted to acrylic 1999 |
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| Andreas Gursky 99 Cent installation view Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf 2012 |
Howard Halle wrote a review called Photo-unrealism about the 1999 exhibition by German photographer Andreas Gursky at Matthew Marks Gallery in Manhattan. Parts of this review, quoted below, were reprinted in 2011 in PAINTING, an anthology published in the series Documents of Contemporary Art by Whitechapel Gallery.
"Gursky works slowly, producing no more than ten pictures a year. He uses the computer to composite multiple views of the same scene and to augment its colors. This would explain the implausibly deep focus and liquidy opalescence of 99 Cent, the show's Meisterstuck."
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| Andreas Gursky 99 Cent installation view 1999 |
"A nearly life-size picture of an American convenience store, 99 Cent has a vantage point that is high, like most of the images here; but it's not a God-like perspective or even the serene gaze from the balcony that Gursky often employs. It's more like your eyes are strangely level with the tops of the shelves, as if you'd suddenly floated off the floor. What you see is aisle after aisle of impossibly distant shoppers who go about their business amid a compartmentalized riot of packages separated by brand – Oreos, Fig Newtons, Nutter-Butters, etc. The colors and details seem as bright and clear in the background as in the foreground; but a closer inspection reveals that none of them are conventionally in focus. Making things seem even more unreal, the entire interior is softly reflected in the store's Mylar-faced ceiling."
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| Andreas Gursky Exhibition catalog Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark) published by Hatje Cantz, 2012 |
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| Andreas Gursky Prada II chromogenic print 1997 |
"But really, what does one make of Gursky's tour de force? The answer may lie in the references to Robert Musil (1880-1942), in both the blown-up text [from his novel The Man Without Qualities] hanging near 99 Cent and another passage from the same book, printed on the show's announcement card. Musil's story, which takes place in Vienna in 1913, revolves around a youngish aristocrat named Ulrich – an ex-soldier, seducer and scientist – who finds himself appointed to the committee in charge of the seventieth anniversary Jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph's rule. Ulrich is socially ambitious, yet he is hampered by his own self-awareness, by his feeling of being an outsider looking in. The quotations Gursky selected are fraught with often contradictory disquisitions on the meaning, or order, of things (surely something that interests the artist); but what's truly telling is the book's setting: the year before the First World War destroys the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, with it, Ulrich's world. ... Gursky obviously identifies with Ulrich, the detached observer; but he also seems to suggest that, like Musil's protagonist, we are all bound to a historical interval. And it too shall pass."