Andreas Gursky receives his first solo exhibition in Korea at Amorepacific Museum of Art

Amorepacific Museum of Art is hosting the first solo exhibition in Korea of work by Andreas Gursky, an artist whose large colour photographs portray dwarfing landscapes that capture the vast and enduring effects of globalisation. In the last two decades, Gursky has used digital technology to document and refine an astounding compilation of detail on an epic scale. Although his work adopts the wide format and composition of history painting, specifically landscape, his photographs are often derived from inauspicious sources: a black and white photograph from a newspaper, for example, whose subject is researched at length before a photograph is finally shot and digitally altered before printing. The perspective in many of Gursky’s photographs is drawn from an elevated vantage point. This position enables the viewer to encounter scenes 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.