LONDON — Photography, Andreas Gursky has said, is not that important to him anymore. Instead, he was quoted by the Financial Times as saying he was more interested in a “painterly view.” This, coming from the creator of the most expensive photograph ever to be sold at auction (over $4 million), is quite a surprising statement. But, as one walks through the exhibition of new and recent work at White Cube, Bermondsey (through July 6), it begins to make sense.
During the past decade, Gursky has been engaging with the history of painting. Earlier in his career the archetypal Gursky image presented mundane reality on such a colossal scale that it morphed into something at once banal and sublime. There are some works of this kind in the White Cube exhibition, which amounts to a mini-retrospective of the artist’s work over the last seven years.
“Quatar,” 2012, looks at first glance like a structure from a science fiction fantasy: a colossal chamber constructed out of gleaming strips of metal and resembling the interior of a futuristic Aztec temple. Then after a while you notice a tiny almost ghostly figure kneeling — in the act of praying or cleaning is not clear — towards the bottom left.
In fact, this is a real place: a gigantic empty gas storage tank in a ship. In some ways, it is a throwback to Gursky’s beginnings. Born in 1955, he studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher — famous for their somber, black and white studies of industrial structures such as gas tanks — at the Dusseldorf Art Academy in the 1970s. But, unlike these teachers, Gursky is no longer a documentary photographer. The initial shot is only the starting-point, which is then edited, altered until in some cases it becomes a sort of digital collage. Thus “Beijing,” 2010, is based on the Olympic “Bird’s Nest” stadium, but transformed into a fantasia of jagged, angular geometry that might have been dreamt up by a Russian Constructivist in the 1920s.
Gursky’s “Bangkok” works from 2011 track in close to the surface of the Chao Phraya River in China. Of course, reflections of water were a theme of lyrical landscape painting from Turner to Monet, and are suggested by the shimmering surfaces of Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings. Gursky evokes that tradition, until you notice stray items of floating garbage, and realize that the dancing colors on the dark waters are caused by oil slicks. So this is ecological lyricism with a sting.
In some of the newest works on show, Gursky moves even further from sober reality. Some — the least satisfactory in the exhibition — deal with comic book heroes set in fantasy landscapes. In the dizzying “Lager,” 2013, or “stockroom” there is a vast stacking system of Bauhaus oblong units receding away to infinity from which various items protrude, including works by Gursky himself. Doubtless, this is a comment on art as commodity: the boundless warehouse of contemporary culture. It also suggests the infinite potential gradations between photograph and painting: the camera image edited to create the effects of a painting, the painting based on photography.
Gursky’s own art is fascinatingly diverse, brilliant — and also somewhat chilly. No doubt that’s intentional, and part of the point. But it is also connected to his medium. However painterly his point of view, I can’t help feeling his work would be warmer and more sensually alluring if it were actually made of paint.
John Virtue’s exhibition “The Sea” at Marlborough Fine Art (through May 31) certainly can’t be faulted on that score. All the works on show, like everything Virtue does, are restricted to black and white. But the effect is not austere; on the contrary it emphasises the physicality of the images, built from flicks, flying dribbles, foam-like sprays and thick strokes of pigment, still bearing the marks of the bristles in the brush.
A piece by John Virtue from his exhibition "The Sea." Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art
Virtue shares subject matter — the turbid surface of water — with Gursky, and the two also have some reference points in common, such as American abstract expressionism. But what a difference there is between them. Where Gursky’s photographic world is cool, Virtue’s paintings are turbulent with compressed energy.
All of them are based on observation of the churning waves on the Norfolk coast. Some are immediately identifiable as landscapes, but many at first glance look close to abstract. They come in various dimensions, from wall-sized down, but the best to my mind are the smallest, on sheets of immensely thick paper, like condensed emblems of natural energy.
John Virtue’s work is also at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, through August 24.
