Gursky Landscapes at Parrish

The German artist will be represented by more than 20 photographs from locations across the globe

Jul. 30, 2015

Jennifer Landes

Snow-capped mountains, a group of Turner paintings, and industrial shipping docks might not be the first thing one thinks of when visiting the South Fork, but the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill plans to give visitors a world tour of some unusual places in the guise of Andreas Gursky photographs beginning Sunday.

The German artist, who lives and works in Dusseldorf, will be represented by more than 20 photographs from locations across the globe. The curatorial selections of Terrie Sultan, the museum’s director, include sites such as Bahrain, Salerno, Pyongyang, and Bangkok. Some of the photographs are quite massive and others more intimate.

According to Ms. Sultan, they seem to be inheritors of the Hudson River School tradition of painting and Carleton Watkins’s photographs of the West. As Mr. Gursky imposes his own interpretation of various landscapes, forsaking scenic vistas for extreme close-ups of topography or less than pristine environments, he works in a tradition where landscapes were often modified and morphed by the 19th-century American landscape painters, she said in an exhibition catalog essay.

The images can be single shots taken with a small-format camera or an amalgam of several images composed digitally. According to the artist, “it doesn’t matter if I deal with landscape, still life, interior, or architecture. For me it is just so much about my view of the world.”

The contrast between his earlier work, dependent on much traveling and effort to find a perfect composition, and his later work is instructive. “Because I have digital possibilities, I can work more independently. I am not a painter, but I have the same freedom now,” he said.

Further, he acknowledges that iconic historical images created by painters are often in his mind, acting in the background to indirectly influence his own compositions. And he sees the actions of man on the land, much as the Hudson River School painters did, as forces to be reflected upon in his images.

The exhibition will be on view through Oct. 18.