Beschreibung:

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, NEW YORK Andreas Gursky Brasilia Plenarsaal II 1994 Color coupler print. 73 1/4 x 89 in. (186.1 x 226.1 cm.) Signed, titled and dated “‘Brasilia Plenarsaal II’ 94 A.Gursky” on the reverse and numbered four of six. This work is from an edition of six.
Provenance Mai 36, Zurich; Sale: Christie’s, New York, Post-War and Contemporary (Evening Sale), May 14, 2002, lot 44; Private collection, New York Exhibited Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Andreas Gursky - Photographs from 1984 to the Present, August - October 1998, p. 35 (another example exhibited and illustrated); Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum; Winterthur, Fotomuseum; London, Serpentine Gallery; Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Turin, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, and Lisbon, Centro Cultural de Belém, Fotografien 1994-1998 Andreas Gursky May 1998 - December 1999, pp. 46-47 (another example exhibited and illustrated); Roslyn Harbor, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, Explosive Photography, January 18 – April 25, 2004 Literature M. L. Syring, ed., Andreas Gursky - Photographs from 1984 to the Present, Dusseldorf, 1998, p. 35 (another example illustrated in color); U. Grosenick, ed., Fotografien 1994-1998 Andreas Gursky Germany, 1998, pp. 46-47 (another example illustrated in color); R. Beil, “Just what is it that makes Gursky's photos so different, so appealing? On Andreas Gursky's Pictorial,” Andreas Gursky Architecture, Ostfildern, 2008, p. 8 (discussed) and p. 41 (another example illustrated in color) Catalogue Essay Andreas Gursky has, more than any artist of his generation, starkly revealed the profound structures and forms of an emerging reality. This nascent world that Gursky depicts is our world in transition as depicted from a crystalline and unwavering point of view. The historic global transformation that has been occurring over the last 30 years has been driven by technological changes which have increased the speed and efficiencies in the flow of information, capital and people around the planet. Training his lens on important nodes in these ever expanding and interpenetrating networks, Gursky has been drawn to locations of travel, production, consumption and trade. Having captured stock exchanges, ports, retail stores, hotels and factories, the artist trains his lens on the human interaction with space and the landscape, illuminating sites that become stages for our collective dramas to be enacted. Amid the transition from dictatorship to democracy, Brazil in 1994 was a subject ripe for Gursky’s investigation. The artist produced a number of images during his trip to the country that year, Plenarsaal II is the most full of prescient vision. In the midst of runaway inflation, the country was wrestling with the political impacts of reengineering its monetary policy. The Plano Real was approved by the Congress in 1994 which pegged the Brazilian currency to the US dollar finally stemming the 1300% annual inflation. Plenarsaal II renders this seminal moment with a grand eloquence befitting the historic implications of the mechanism of consensus on display. Capturing the plenary hall of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies , the Camara dos Deputados, Gursky provides us a bounded scene, or a “closed microcosm”, that reveals the dynamics of power that determine the form of our emerging world. Read More