£2.7m Record price for Andreas Gursky’s photo
A photograph of the Rhine river by German artist Andreas Gursky created in 1999 has sold at auction for a record $4.3 million at Christie’s New York. This now becomes the most expensive photograph in the world overtaking lasts years record achieved by the American photographer Cindy Sherman.”Untitled,” sold for $3.8 million at Christie’s in May. The large Gursky panorama titled, “Rhein II,” is a chromogenic color print face-mounted to acrylic glass. It had a pre-sale estimate of $2.5 million to $3.5 million. The buyer was not disclosed but suspected to be a private collector. The photo is one of an edition of six prints, four are in high profile public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London.
Andreas Gursky’s large-scale color photographs of landscapes, buildings, and masses of people have been likened to paintings. Gursky studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1980s, where he honed his fascination with the ways people live in the world and how their existence impacts their surroundings. In the early 1990s he began using digital tools to heighten formal elements and circumvent the limits of perspective in his pictures.
Gursky (born 1955) first exhibited his work at Matthew Marks Gallery in 1997. The exhibition included 12 large-scale photographs, among them Rhein, a signature work. He has exhibited throughout Europe and the United States, and his work was the subject of a retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2001, which toured extensively. The Kunstmuseum Basel mounted a major Gursky exhibition, and the Haus der Kunst Munich organized a traveling exhibition of works made by the artist between 1987 and 2007. The Vancouver Art Gallery, the Moderna Museet Stockholm, and the Kunstmuseen Krefeld jointly organized an exhibition of Gursky’s work made between 1980 to 2008. Gursky lives and works in Düsseldorf.
The Top Ten Priciest Photos
1) Andreas Gursky
Rhine II, 1999
£2.7m ($4,3m)
Christie’s New York, November 2011
2) Cindy Sherman
Untitled #96, 1981
£2.4m ($3,9m)
Christie’s New York, May 2011
3) Richard Prince
Untitled (Cowboy), c.2001–2002
£2.1 ($3,401,000)
Sotheby’s New York, November 20074. Andreas Gursky
4) Richard Prince
99 Cent II Diptychon, 2001
£2.07 ($3,346,456)
Sotheby’s London, February 2007
5) Edward Steichen
The Pond-Moonlight, 1904
£1.9 ($2,928,000)
Sotheby’s New York, February 2006
6) Unknown photographer
Billy the Kidd,1879–80
£1.4 ($2,300,000)
Brian Lebel’s Old West Show & Auction in Denver, June 2011
7) Dmitry Medvedev
Kremlin of Tobolsk, 2009
£1.1m ($1,750,000)
January 2010, Christmas Yarmarka, Saint Petersburg.[6][7][8]
8) Edward Weston
Nude, 1925
£1 ($1,609,000)
Sotheby’s New York, April 2008
9) Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia O’Keeffe (Hands), 1919
£923,000 ($1,470,000)
Sotheby’s New York, February 2006
10) Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia O’Keeffe Nude, 1919
£854,000 ($1,360,000)
Sotheby’s New York, February 2006