With a delicate feeling for social relevance, and with the compositional exactness of an Old Master, Gursky filters enigmatic single frames out of the topography of modern life. Places which art has not felt were its domain up until now become “picture worthy”: the finishing hall of a fully-automatic textile factory, the swimming pool in a business hotel, the self-service restaurant in a ski area, the sorting machinery in a major, modern, post office (“PTT Rotterdam”). Again and again, Gursky renders the junctions of the global, and often invisible, network, visible – places (or “non-places”) of transportation, tourism, or financial management – it concerns the structural in reality. When Gursky, who carried out his first pictorial field research in the post-industrial Ruhr region of Germany, was once asked why people in his pictures are always abstracted to tiny figures, he said that his interest was in humankind as a whole, and not in the individual.

Looking at Gursky’s interiors, the richness of perspective inherent in modern interior spaces becomes noticeable. One pays attention to the grid formations of dismantles ceilings just as much as to the ornamental aspects of rational design.

Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)