Unibochum

Andreas Gursky is renowned for his vastly expansive photographs of nature, interiors, architecture, and people-all subjects represented in Unibochum. The work presages several of the elements that would come to mark Gursky's practice, including a sustained consideration of the patterns human beings form in the spaces they occupy; the intersection of colossal architecture with the transitory and unpredictable facets of everyday life. Here, mammoth beams, a gridded ceiling, and a tiled floor create a strong, rectilinear pictorial structure, but this order is offset by more fleeting and incidental features: two pairs of people in conversation, a coffee cup set on the ground, a misty haze blanketing the forested landscape in the background. In Gursky's work, nature and culture, representation and abstraction, and public and private cohabit and often collide, blurring the boundaries of these categorical designations.
Unibochum stands as an important, pivotal work in Gursky's oeuvre: it dates from year of his first solo exhibition, and the time of its making coincided with the beginning of what would prove to be an ongoing experimentation with photographic scale. In 1987 Gursky set aside his smaller negatives and began using larger negatives and formats.
Excited by the details revealed in these big negatives, the artist began to digitally manipulate his images in the early 1990s. He now works with his negatives on the computer, often revising pixel by pixel and tweaking them for maximum color saturation and visual impact. The effect of beholding his photographs has been compared to looking through a telescope and microscope simultaneously; as is the case with Unibochum, Gursky's hyper-real images are as spellbinding and rewarding up close as they are from far away.
rewarding up close as they are from far away.
rewarding up close as they are from far away.