★★★★☆
The Hayward Gallery in London reopens, after a two-year redevelopment, with an exhibition of Andreas Gursky. Curators could hardly have made a more apposite choice. The gallery site, set amid the South Bank’s labyrinth of brutalist concrete, is the very sort of place that this German photographer might make his subject. Certainly the refurbishment, except where it lets welcome daylight into the upper galleries, seems pretty hard to spot. Love it or loathe it, the Hayward retains its familiar stark feel.
Gursky, in the 1990s in large part responsible for putting photography at the heart of the contemporary art map, is best recognised for the vast panoramic pictures that show us our world as it has been shaped by industrialism and its capitalist forces. This retrospective — the first to come to this country — includes many of his most famous works. Here, in his images of a frenzied Chicago trading floor, of the tightly packed shelves of a 99 cent store, of the gridded façades of drab concrete tenements, is a document of the human ant-hill.
On the flipside are pictures of nature’s wide expanses: desolate mountains, empty roads and, in the most expensive photograph ever to be sold (in 2011 it fetched $4.3 million), a deserted stretch of grey river.
Don’t think that you’ve seen them just because you have come across reproductions. This is an artist who can make a beaten-up stretch of office carpet look interesting. To get the full effect, you have to confront his pictures face to face, move forward to peer at every detail, step back to discover the repetitive pattern. Gursky draws as directly upon the aesthetics of abstraction as he does upon the documentary ability of the camera.
Occasionally, lured by more exotic subject matter, his vision loses its stark clarity. His recent images of festivities in Pyongyang, however extraordinary, have the feel of tourist posters. Yet others of the eight new works, which this show includes, count among his most haunting: the rubbish-strewn verge of a road crossing an agricultural wasteland of plastic; the interior of an Amazon warehouse. Gursky offers a deadpan take on some of our most pressing current problems: climate change, the exploitation of natural resources, nuclear energy, pollution. The fact that even as we are immersed by them we are forced to feel so oddly detached makes them all the more disconcerting.
Andreas Gursky is at the Hayward Gallery from January 25 to April 22