Andreas Gursky valuation
Photographs the modern world from a height, at a size that makes the crowd legible one figure at a time.
Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig in 1955 into a family of commercial photographers and studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf under Bernd and Hilla Becher, alongside Thomas Ruff, Candida Hofer and Thomas Struth.
What a work by Andreas Gursky is worth
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Bio
Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig in 1955 into a family of commercial photographers and studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf under Bernd and Hilla Becher, alongside Thomas Ruff, Candida Hofer and Thomas Struth. The subject is the systems people live inside: stock exchange floors, the Rhine, a Prada shelf, a Pyongyang stadium, a container port, a 99 Cent store. The pictures are made from a raised, frontal viewpoint, printed very large, and since the early 1990s digitally combined from multiple exposures, so the whole surface stays in focus and the eye can move across it indefinitely without finding a centre.
Everything is editioned and the editions are small — often six, sometimes fewer, with artist's proofs — so the edition number and the print date are the identifying facts. The prints are typically chromogenic, face-mounted to acrylic and framed by the artist's specification, and that mounting is part of the work: it cannot be reversed, it scratches, and it is sensitive to light and heat. Several images exist in more than one size as distinct editions. Signature, number and date are usually on a label on the reverse of the frame.
Rhein II, and the Hayward retrospective
Rhein II, made in 1999, reduces the river to horizontal bands of water, grass, path and grey sky, with passers-by and a factory building on the far bank removed digitally. It is one of an edition of six, with other examples at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at Tate Modern.
The Hayward Gallery in London reopened after its refurbishment with the first major Gursky retrospective in Britain, from January to April 2018, which included five new works made for it. Museum examples of an image are worth knowing about, since they confirm its edition size and dimensions, and the gallery that sold a print holds the record of which number it is.
Folkwang, Bernd Becher and 99 Cent
Gursky's father, Willy, and his grandfather, Hans, were both photographers, and by the end of 1957 the family had moved from Leipzig to Essen and then Düsseldorf. From 1978 to 1981 he studied visual communication, with a focus on photography, at the Folkwang school in Essen under Otto Steinert and Michael Schmidt, before joining Bernd Becher's class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1981 to 1987. He later taught at the Kunstakademie as a professor, and he was involved in setting up the Deutsches Fotoinstitut in Düsseldorf, the first national institution for photography in Germany.
The prints, some up to six feet high and ten feet long, reminded the critic Calvin Tomkins of nineteenth-century landscape painting, and he called Gursky one of the two masters of the Düsseldorf School; Peter Schjeldahl described the pictures in The New Yorker as vast and literally unbelievable. 99 Cent, of 1999, was taken in a 99 Cents Only store on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. For the six-part Ocean series of 2009 and 2010 he worked from high-definition satellite photographs, adding material from other sources on the internet. The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him a retrospective in 2001, and Gagosian has represented him since 2010.
Best auction results
- Rhein II $4.3m
- Chromogenic print mounted to acrylic, 1999 · New York · 8 November 2011
- Publicly reported
- One of an edition of six. The highest price paid at auction for a photograph from 2011 until 2022.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
