About the person
born 1955 in Leipzig
lives and works in Düsseldorf
Andreas Gursky comes from a family of advertising photographers. Both his grandfather and his father practiced this profession. Following this path, Gursky studied visual communication at the University of Essen from 1978 to 1981. Following this, Gursky moved to the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he studied under Bernd Becher, whose master student he was from 1985 to 1987. The group of Becher's students Axel Hütte, Jörg Sasse, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer and Thomas Ruff would later coin the term "Düsseldorf School of Photography".
In 2010, the photo artist himself was appointed Professor of Fine Art at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. He has been an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2007 and a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts since 2012.
Today, Andreas Gursky is one of the most important photographers internationally.
About the artwork
Lützerath was created in response to the recent protests against open-pit lignite mining and explores contemporary environmental activism. Between 2020 and 2023, the village of Lützerath in North Rhine-Westphalia was occupied by climate activists seeking to prevent the expansion of the Garzweiler II open-pit mine. While the activists positioned themselves in hard-to-reach treehouses, hammocks, and platforms high in the trees, the lower part of the image reveals cranes, barricades, police officers, and security personnel whose objective is to clear the area.
As is characteristic of Andreas Gursky’s work, the image captivates through its monumental scale and extraordinary sharpness of detail. Gursky transforms a contemporary political event into a timeless, monumental history painting whose composition directly references the apocalyptic multitude depicted in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels. In doing so, he elevates the subject matter from a specific political conflict to an existential level, where the struggle is framed as one between good and evil, order and chaos.