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Lot Essay
"Andreas Gursky's art has arisen from a restless, risky process of experiment (...…) in which naïve curiosity mingles with sophisticated calculation and alert scrutiny of other art." Peter Galassi, in 'Andreas Gursky', New York 2001.
Nowhere is this aesthetic more intriguingly explored than in Gursky's 'Prada' series, of which Untitled IV (Prada I) is one of the most captivating examples. The Prada store represents the apex of consumer fetishism: with its severe architectural lines, luxurious acres of empty space and sparsely populated shelves suffused with a muted, meditative light, it has become almost a place of worship, albeit a rather exclusive one, the new cathedral of the secular West. In Untitled IV (Prada I), it is those most fetishised of objects, women's shoes, that are displayed with the deceptively seductive simplicity that has become synonymous with that label.
The artist's choice of store is very much deliberate. While fully aware of its social implications, Gursky uses the rigorous architectural purity of the store to indulge his affinity for the imposing clarity of unbroken parallel forms. The aesthetic at play owes much more to the dispassionate ideals of Minimalism than to the cynicism of Conceptual art, and in particular to Donald Judd, whose transformation of what Peter Galassi has called "the solemn majesty of infinite progression (...) into the anaesthetic repetitions of the assembly line and the display case" has a particular significance here.
There is also a conscious artificiality at play in this work. In the early 1990s, Gursky began to doctor his pictures digitally, largely to eliminate anecdotal detail and accentuate the underlying formal structure. However, unlike most artists working with computers, he still makes colour prints from celluloid negatives, and as a result, his images retain crystalline definition, minuscule grain and a high-gloss sheen. This rigorous adherence to the conventions of documentary photography, that is a flawless technique and a dispassionate treatment of subject matter, was made famous by artists like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gursky's mentors at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf.
The success of his approach lies in the skillful combination of the distance and purity of the Minimalist aesthetic with the technological sophistication of his digital adjustments that serve to enhance the formal beauty of the work and play with the audience: whilst aware that the image has been manipulated, we cannot know which elements have been changed or removed and instead are compelled to surrender to the seductive 'reality' with which we are presented.
Nowhere is this aesthetic more intriguingly explored than in Gursky's 'Prada' series, of which Untitled IV (Prada I) is one of the most captivating examples. The Prada store represents the apex of consumer fetishism: with its severe architectural lines, luxurious acres of empty space and sparsely populated shelves suffused with a muted, meditative light, it has become almost a place of worship, albeit a rather exclusive one, the new cathedral of the secular West. In Untitled IV (Prada I), it is those most fetishised of objects, women's shoes, that are displayed with the deceptively seductive simplicity that has become synonymous with that label.
The artist's choice of store is very much deliberate. While fully aware of its social implications, Gursky uses the rigorous architectural purity of the store to indulge his affinity for the imposing clarity of unbroken parallel forms. The aesthetic at play owes much more to the dispassionate ideals of Minimalism than to the cynicism of Conceptual art, and in particular to Donald Judd, whose transformation of what Peter Galassi has called "the solemn majesty of infinite progression (...) into the anaesthetic repetitions of the assembly line and the display case" has a particular significance here.
There is also a conscious artificiality at play in this work. In the early 1990s, Gursky began to doctor his pictures digitally, largely to eliminate anecdotal detail and accentuate the underlying formal structure. However, unlike most artists working with computers, he still makes colour prints from celluloid negatives, and as a result, his images retain crystalline definition, minuscule grain and a high-gloss sheen. This rigorous adherence to the conventions of documentary photography, that is a flawless technique and a dispassionate treatment of subject matter, was made famous by artists like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gursky's mentors at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf.
The success of his approach lies in the skillful combination of the distance and purity of the Minimalist aesthetic with the technological sophistication of his digital adjustments that serve to enhance the formal beauty of the work and play with the audience: whilst aware that the image has been manipulated, we cannot know which elements have been changed or removed and instead are compelled to surrender to the seductive 'reality' with which we are presented.