Measuring over four metres in length, the landmark work Harry Styles (2025) emerged from an extended collaboration with the British musician, during which Gursky was granted on-stage access at live concerts. Combining imagery from performances in Bologna and Frankfurt, the work has been digitally reconfigured so that each figure in the crowd is rendered with equal clarity, forming a mass that reads simultaneously as a unified throng and a constellation of individuals. Where one might expect such an image to dissolve the identities of thousands of concertgoers, Gursky instead affords each a distinct, photographic presence. By contrast, in capturing the singer – the sole focus of the rapt crowd – from behind, the artist both acknowledges the presence of an icon and withholds their identity. The resulting work, with its crisply rendered facial expressions and smartphones, becomes both a record of youth culture and a striking meditation on stardom.   

Other recent works turn to spaces of industrial and environmental transformation. Thyssenkrupp, Duisburg (2025), taken within the German steel plant ThyssenKrupp, examines the scale and precision of industrial production while reflecting on the broader socio-economic pressures reshaping the industry – overcapacity, the influx of low-cost imports and the shift towards environmentally sustainable manufacturing. After months of observation, Gursky condensed the process into a single moment: a freshly cast, glowing steel ingot caught in the interval between molten metal and realised form, that awaits transport for further processing. The horizontal slab dominates the composition, its incandescent surface suffused with heat set against the dark furnace wall. More than a record of production, the photograph stands as a monument to labour, acknowledging the role of ThyssenKrupp as one of Europe’s leading steel manufacturers. Komori (2025), meanwhile, captures the pounding rhythm of a high-end Japanese printing press, renowned for its efficacy and widely employed in the printing of banknotes. Here, the machine’s trays of wet ink are reconfigured into a shifting, abstract plane: streaks and pools coalesce into a painterly surface in which figuration dissolves altogether.  

Turning to a site of contestation, Lützerath (2023) extends Gursky’s enquiries into the intersections between human activity and broader systems. Its title refers to a hamlet in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia that became a focal point of climate activism between 2020 and 2023, where environmental protestors gathered in opposition to lignite mining. Following the decision to expand the nearby Garzweiler surface mine in 2013, Lützerath was marked for demolition; hundreds of residents were displaced and much of the village destroyed. Protestors set up camp in the deserted settlement, occupying trees, fields and houses, before being forcibly removed in 2023, after which time the village was razed. Standing as a testament against erasure, Gursky’s photograph registers the drama of human resistance to the face of extractive governance, depicting tree-sitters and makeshift shelters precariously nestled among the branches while lines of officers and bulldozers mass below.  

In a parallel investigation addressing the trajectories of change, Gursky revisits locations he has photographed across the decades. In Paris, Montparnasse II (2025), he re-creates one of his most recognised images – his 1993 photograph of Jean Dubuisson’s Immeuble d’habitation Maine-Montparnasse II. Describing the building as a ‘vast panopticon’, Gursky underscores its modular design, which compresses the lives of its occupants into distinct yet uniform units. The 2025 iteration, however, employs advanced digital techniques to reimagine the earlier work: the façade is here rendered with an analytical, almost forensic clarity, transforming figurative elements into formalist patterns. Similarly, (Aletsch Glacier II) (2024) and Klausen Pass II (2025) return to landscapes in the Swiss Alps that he first photographed in 1993, revealing the marked transformations – most visibly the glacier’s diminished expanse – that bear witness to the accelerating impact of climate change. 

In Elektroherd (Electronic Cooker) (2025) Gursky reimagines one of his earliest photographs, Gasherd (Gas Cooker) (1980). The original depicts the basic gas stove in the Düsseldorf apartment he lived in as a student, while Elektroherd features the electric induction stove in the artist’s current kitchen. Shown in dialogue, the two works reflect the teachings of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German duo renowned for their typologies of industrial structures and their methodical approach to photography, who taught Gursky at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. By attending to familiar, domestic objects, Gursky channels Bernd and Hilla’s emphasis on close observation, systematic recording and formal rigour. This pedagogical influence is continued in Thomas Ruff (1983), a photograph of his friend and fellow artist, taken during their time as students together at the academy. The image shows Ruff directing an early shoot for Porträts (Portraits) (1981–2001), his serial project of passport-style portraits of friends and colleagues. Gursky’s documentary-style photograph here reflects Ruff’s emerging serial methodology, as well as his own sensibility, offering a tacit homage to the mentors whose influence endures in his work.  

Through his photographs, Gursky traces the co-evolution of human activity and technology, both of which leave indelible marks upon the natural environment. Yet for all the charged nature of his subjects, Gursky resists the didactic image, seeking instead to distil the ‘threat and destruction but also the beauty’. As he has noted, ‘I may also prevent my images from being understood too quickly. A clearly accusatory image with a political message is not my thing, because the image then loses its appeal. It needs a form, a coding’. Turning to architecture, mountain ranges, banks, protest sites and factories with the same evidentiary precision and curiosity, he renders the contemporary as a condition of complexity, paradox and transformation.  

Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1955. He has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at MAST Fondazione, Bologna, Italy (2023); Amorepacific Museum, Seoul (2022); Museum Küppersmühle, Duisburg, Germany (2021); Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Germany (2021); Hayward Gallery, London (2018); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K20, Düsseldorf, Germany (2016); Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany (2015); Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2015); National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2014); The National Art Center, Tokyo (2013); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2012); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2009); Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2009); Museum Haus Lange und Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany (2008); Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany (2008); Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2007); Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, touring to Istanbul Modern and Sharjah Art Museum, United Arab Emirates (2007); and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2001) which toured to other venues. Group exhibitions include Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland (2016); 9th Venice Biennale of Architecture, Italy (2004); 25th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2002); 4th Shanghai Biennale, China (2002); and 12th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2000).