23 March - 5 May 2007 PV March 22nd

White Cube Mason's Yard is pleased to present the work of Andreas Gursky in his first major solo exhibition with the gallery. Renowned for his large-format colour photographs charting themes of globalised society at work and play, Gursky's new production employs the latest digital technology to capture and refine an astounding compilation of detail on an epic scale.

The perspective in many of Gursky's photographs is drawn from an elevated vantage point. This position enables the viewer to encounter scenes, encompassing both centre and periphery, which are ordinarily beyond reach. For the Pyongyang series (2007), Gursky travelled to the Arirang Festival, held annually in North Korea in honour of the late Communist leader Kim Il Sung. The festival's mass games include more than 50,000 participants performing tightly choreographed acrobatics, against a backdrop of 30,000 schoolchildren holding coloured flip-cards that produce an ever-changing mosaic of patterns and images. Gursky's photographs describe, in panoramic dimensions, the incongruity of the brilliant colours and smiling faces of the performers within the controlled, totalitarian nature of the event.

A chamber designed to detect the smallest known particles in the universe is the subject of Kamiokande (2007). The actual scale of the neutrino observatory in the Mozumi mine, deep below the town of Kamioka-cho in Japan, is at first glance ambiguous. Containing 50,000 tons of purified water, surrounded by thousands of photomultiplier tubes protected by metallic spheres, its immensity becomes clear as two small boats float into view at the bottom of the image, each containing a figure gazing up at the vast architecture that engulfs them.

(more…)