BOLOGNA.- The exhibition Andreas Gursky. Visual Spaces of Today, scheduled to end in January 2024, is the first anthological exhibition of the artist in Italy. It is curated by Urs Stahel together with the German photographer Andreas Gursky and marked the opening of the celebrations for a double anniversary: 100 years of the G.D Company and 10 years of Fondazione MAST.

“Making work a culture and culture a work”. These are the words that bind the two organisations together. They represent the longtime, consolidated corporate culture of the company, as well as the innovative and inclusive space it created to promote thought on the topic of work.

The visual spaces in the works selected for the exhibition by Urs Stahel and Andreas Gursky mirror these thematic worlds. The artist’s powerful images disclose new views on work, the economy, and globalization. They reveal concrete visions of production plants, goods handling centres, temples of consumption, transport hubs, energy and food industries, and financial centres across the world.

Included in the exhibition are 40 images by the artist—who lives and works in Düsseldorf—dating from his early works (Krefeld, Hühner, 1989) to his more recent production (V&R II and V&R III, 2022), travelling great lengths, from Salerno (1990) to Hong Kong (2020), and combining modern tourism industry (Rimini, 2003) with age-old production processes (Salinas, 2021).

Andreas Gursky is considered one of the greatest artists of our time. Since the 1990s, his name has been associated with large-scale photography. His images have become iconic representations of the contemporary world and have contributed to elevating the status of photography to an art form, thus turning it into a collector’s item for museum and private collections.

“To this day, Andreas Gursky’s enormous visual power is such that entering into the universe of his images becomes each time an experience and a step towards awareness. The display of his photographs brings us into a space and time where we can physically, mentally and emotionally feel and grasp reality,” writes Urs Stahel. Gursky’s striking visual compositions show the artist’s keen eye in finely dissecting the present, his precision in setting the focus on a subject, as he goes deeper into things while, at the same time, presenting a vivid general picture. As Urs Stahel points out in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, “The large format that Andreas Gursky chose very soon in his career is in itself a statement of the artist’s visual and content­-related stance, and one that challenges the viewer.”

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition is published by Fondazione MAST. It contains a foreword by the President Isabella Seràgnoli and a critical essay by the curator Urs Stahel.