Avenue of the Americas

Avenue of the Americas, 2001 captures a nocturnal view of an illuminated high-rise office building on the titular avenue in New York. Gursky adopts a parallel viewpoint that renders a planar image and crops it so that the recognizable coordinates of the building disappear to leave a uniform, self-contained grid that appears to continue beyond the borders of the frame. Gursky executes an image that verges on the cusp of abstraction. Compromising depth and assuming a rhythmic pattern between the illuminated and darkened windows, Gursky bows to a Post-Cubist Minimalist grid. In doing so, he creates an "abstract realist" image that no longer reflects the specificity of location, but is symbolic of the edifices that characterize skyscrapers in an industralized and rapidly industralizing world.