Andreas Gursky. Inherited Images
Sprüth Magers, New York
From March 14th until April 19th, 2025
Düsseldorf-based artist Andreas Gursky is recognised as being one of the most prominent photographers of his generation, offering scaled works that redefine and have us questioning the medium, capturing the circumstances of modern-day life in a condensed form. Themes that occupy his work include globalisation, consumerism, and social phenomena as they relate to society, and he investigates the realities of our changing planet, uncovering the issues for the viewer to see.
Running from March to April, is his latest exhibition, Inherited Images at Sprüth Magers in New York. A solo show, expect new and recent works as well as a selection of his well-known photographs set in an intertextual dialogue with Old Masters at Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers’ New York gallery. In true form, the exhibition examines how contemporary images relate to ones of the past, exploring the conditions of image-making while highlighting our relationships with images created centuries apart.
opening image: Andreas Gursky, Lützerath, 2023 (detail) and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1562 (detail).
This is demonstrated via Lützerath, on view at the gallery for the first time, it depicts the climate crisis as we see activists tree-sitting in protest to the excavation of a small village in North Rhine-Westphalia while police peer up. Occupied in response to the expansion of the open-pit coal mine on its doorstep, Lützerath became the center of the fight over coal and climate in early 2023. Images like these have become familiar around the world since the act of tree-sitting became a popular form of demonstration in the 1980s and 1990s. Here, Gursky’s image represents the global struggle to eliminate fossil fuel usage, failed environmental policy, and the worsening climate crisis.
Then, a section of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels details the first clash between Good and Evil when Lucifer turns against the divine authority; here, the artist encourages the viewers to reflect on a history of both the subject and choices that reinforce the idea of a war in heaven, be it in a biblical or a political context. As the gallery says, Gursky’s elaborate works reproduce modern life in grand proportions while evoking a thoughtful commentary on our interactions with the world, presenting extraordinary images about images.
For further information spruetmagers.com.
