Andreas Gursky | White Cube
I visited the exhibition on a late opening at Frieze week, so it was pretty packed and there were drinks. The disadvantage of having this fancy crowd around was that I couldn’t really get close to Andreas Gursky’s intricate but icy-cool photos. The advantage was that I overheard some gossip: that the great man hadn’t wanted to put the show on at all, but was forced into it by the gallery for commercial reasons.
I have no idea if that’s true. But either way the taint of patronage is visible in the centrepiece of the show: a glittery shot of a recent Harry Styles concert - the points of light on the performer’s spangly outfit matching with the thousands of phone lights in the audience. Apparently it was commissioned. All a world away from Gursky’s modest origins in backwater 1980s Düsseldorf. Since then, his photos of crowds, man-made systems and natural wonders that made him famous always seemed to maintain a critical distance. In 2025, his Harry Styles is a blingy bauble for a self-pitying pop star, filmed by a million phones wherever he goes.
I might have just been thoroughly buzzed from the free vodka sodas, but I felt joyful when I saw my favourite Gursky of all, ‘Paris, Montparnasse’, downstairs. It’s a 1993 photo of a modernist tower block, one of the very first to use his now tried and true process of painstaking digital re-composition. So that each individual flat in the block is picked out perfectly, and the surrounding buildings, which in real life block the view, are excised. (Just like we get an unobstructed view of each phone-toting Harry Style concert goer, 30 years later.)
There’s a voyeuristic fascination of peering into people’s windows, again and again. But then you take a step back and take in the whole, and it’s Mondrian, it’s Malevich, it’s an infinitely evocative grid. And then you retreat into your own mind, and have dizzying thoughts of the complex urban systems that made this building even possible, not to mention the variety of human stories that could live between these thousands of walls.
That’s why Jay Jopling (allegedly) put his foot down and dragged the master out to put him on show. That’s why Harry Styles stamped his sequinned foot and said, I want a GURSKY. That’s why he’s still doing the same trick, 20 years later. The trick is really, really good.
Anyway, next to the tower block is a smaller-scale photo of a single bath towel, taken this year. It’s a mocking counterpoint to the vastness elsewhere, and maybe a silent middle finger from the artist to me (and us). I bet nobody commissioned that.
Andreas Gursky is at White Cube (London). 11 October - 08 November 2025