Andreas Gursky Stock Exchanges

“I pursue one goal – the encyclopaedia of life.”
–Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky’s sensational depictions of stock exchanges, initiated in 1990 and repeatedly revisited throughout his career, are together one of the most arresting metaphors for the socioeconomic topography of our age. This sequence comprises a significant number of Gursky’s existing portfolio of stock exchange pictures and stands as the most significant and comprehensive ensemble of Gursky’s seminal cycle to exist in either public or private hands. Never before in Gursky’s ample and international exhibition history has such a large group of stock exchanges been publicly exhibited together. 

Across the breadth of the present compendium, East and West do not so much collide as conform to a pattern, a cross-cultural social paradigm homogenised by the uninhibited accumulation of wealth. Dispassionately detached, the brilliance of Gursky’s artistic eye lies in the distillation of an essential geometry or pattern symptomatic for our global age.

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
London | 26 June 2013

Images:
Chicago Board of Trade III, 1999-2009
Chicago Board of Trade, 1997
Hong Kong, Stock Exchange (diptych), 1994
Hong Kong, Stock Exchange (diptych), 1994
Kuwait, Stock Exchange II, 2008
Tokyo, Stock Exchange, 1990