Autobahn Mettman

"...Gursky has not treated painting and photography as enemies, the latter jealously regarding the former. He has treated them as friends, and so has drawn from the encounter an unpredictable and inventive course of experiment. While a good deal of contemporary photography indeed deserves to be classified as a form of Pictorialist revival, Gursky has never stood still long enough for the pall of predictability to settle upon his work. Consider, for example, Autobahn, Mettmann, of 1993- an excellent example of Gursky's talent for creating images that begin by delivering the jolt of the unexpected and stay with us by offering the rewards of contemplation and reflection. One might decode the picture as a knowing cultural overlay, in which pristine aluminum strips reminiscent of a Donald Judd stack have been superimposed upon a painterly field animated by brushstroke grass and an artfully asymmetrical arrangement of cows borrowed from Claude Lorrain or Constable- as if to measure the cultural distance between the pastoral past and the postindustrial present. There is nothing wrong with this sort of art-historical name dropping, for indeed the theme of Gursky's picture seems to be the gap between our romantic nostalgia for a long-lost rustic ideal and our headlong pursuit of precision and speed. By appealing directly to the court of painting and sculpture, however, such an interpretation overlooks much of the verve of the picture, which is after all a photograph" (P. Galassi in 'Gursky's World' in Andreas Gursky, exh. cat., New York 2001, p. 36).