Andreas Gursky at the White Cube

Andreas Gursky’s work feels a bit like this: type in your postcode on Google Earth; there you are - the centre of the world with all your concerns and worries. Now zoom out, so only the names of the roads are showing, then out, into the districts, then towns, cities, countries, until, in its own cinematic way, the globe is showing against the background of the milky way. And if that doesn’t calm you down nothing will.

He has two main tricks. One: his photographs are printed on an enormous scale, with dimensions of six feet and more by no means uncommon. Two: he often uses a high, almost aerial viewpoint. His favourite subjects are large, man-made spaces: skyscrapers, stock exchanges and art museums. These make for incredible photographs, like Chicago Board of Trade II (1999). It measures 6 feet by almost 8 feet and shows the trading floor in both perfect individual detail and as sweeping composition in which each part fades into the whole. 

When you look at each of these people gesticulating, you can’t help but feel how important they think everything around them is, the great extent to which they think it is the centre of the world. It is de rigueur to belittle bankers and traders as egotists, but Gursky strikes a different note: they are humans, and like all humans they are very small. 

This show, of new and old work, is his second with the White Cube, and focuses on more of the wild constructions humans have felt compelled to create. In an ever-more digital world this entails the use of digital images and photoshopping, a development from his analogue background. We are promised works appropriated from Hollywood superhero films, and others focused on the monumental, sterile absurdities of the modern art museum, where priceless art is taken out of any real-world context and put into the “white cube” of an enormous gallery that is really made entirely of empty, noiseless space.