More images on my mind....

Andreas Gursky, May Day III. 1998.

I was lucky enough to receive a book on Gursky as a present this year... whilst the spectacle aspect of the images is fascinating I find his exploratory work very interesting. There are a number of images in the book - ie. details of famous paintings, Pollock paintings in situ and complete pages of books - that don't fit with the greater perception of his hyper-detail work but are nonetheless spectacular in their own right.

A lot of his work references - consciously or otherwise - master compositions and I particularly enjoy the apocalyptical aspects of this image. Irrelevant of the Turner look and feel, the image reminds me very much of Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa.



This even more so when you read the story of the painting (click on image).