Rhein II,

Andreas Gursky is internationally the most successful German photographer today. Since the beginning of the 1990s, he has been working on his complex panoramas of the conditio humana of our times in his large-format, colour images. Carefully structured down to the last detail, everyday motifs, urban views, landscapes, the global world of commerce and consumption, as well as rock concerts and sports events form the basis of his photographs in which ¿ with the help of digital image processing ¿ Gursky creates visions of reality from actual facts and his own compositional ideas. Rhein II is a view of the river that is surrounded by myths and has so conditioned the German identity. More precisely, this is a picture of a place on the Rhine near Düsseldorf that has been digitally reworked and enlarged to a width of almost four metres. All signs of human life and settlement have been eliminated. The viewer sees the Rhine as an almost monochromatic image made up of greyish-green fields of colour that ¿ in our mind¿s eye ¿ extend endlessly beyond the edges of the picture. The Rhine stretches out in front of us in its leaden state, not governed by time, crystal clear yet simultaneously somehow remote. Gursky wanted to come up with a contemporary picture of the Rhine that is far removed from the picture-postcard idyll; a picture that, however, cannot be found in reality but has to be composed fictitiously.