“You never notice any arbitrary details in my work. On a formal level, countless interrelated micro and macrostructures are woven together, determined by an overall organisational principle. A closed microcosm which, thanks to my distanced attitude towards my subject, allows the viewer to recognise the hinges that hold the system together.”
—Andreas Gursky 

Created in 2000 at the turn of a new millennium that would be governed by the laws of capital, exchange, and a networked, globalised economy like never before, German photographer Andreas Gursky’s New York, Mercantile Exchange is an immersive, defining image of our times. Impressively scaled, chromatically dazzling, and brimming with all of the taught energy and frantic vitality of the stock exchange floor, the work belongs to the artist’s most iconic and important series, that took these engine rooms of global trade and commerce as their subject. As an artist whose work oscillates between the documentary and a searching, perceptive understanding of the systems and networks that govern contemporary life, the scenes of complex chaos captured across The Stock Exchanges series have become synonymous with both the artist’s project and the ideology of late capitalism itself.
 

Gursky first embarked on The Stock Exchanges series in 1990, traveling over three different continents and documenting the invisible but rapid acceleration of globalised financial networks over a twenty-year period through ten distinct images taken in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Chicago, New York, and Kuwait. Given the rate of technological change and the radical implications of this on the speed and flow of global capital during this decisive period, the works from this series provide a fascinating historical document of the acceleration of bonds between finance, technology, and modernity. Nevertheless, although sleek wireless devices replaced awkward, large white cubicles and monitors in ever-more immediate, virtual transactions, the high-stakes human drama and emotional intensity of these mercantile spaces remains unchanged. In his uncanny ability to ‘distil the specific characteristics of a certain culture, the mindset of a generation, or the zeitgeist of an era’ into visually complex and richly detailed compositions, Gursky’s New York, Mercantile Exchange resonates unexpectedly with the unruly panoramas of contemporary 16th-century life by the likes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.ⁱ 
 

As in The Stock Exchanges, Bruegel’s careful attention to the rich panoply of life in busy market scenes generates a pictorial tension between the individual and the collective, the artist showing us the messy noise of contemporary life played out on both macro and micro levels simultaneously. Like Bruegel, Gursky adopts a slightly elevated perspective, so that while the immersive scale of the work draws us into the frenzied activity of the composition, we are able to take in both the full composition and localised detail concurrently. Our eye pulled rapidly across the surface as it seeks out patterns in the colourful groupings of neon yellow, navy, red, and purple jackets, we register the complex simultaneity of the composition, its multiple characters at once anonymous and individualised and introducing a very human narrative into the more schematic vision of these invisible networks of power. 
 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Among the most prolific photographers of his generation, Andreas Gursky is known for his monumental photographs that present familiar aspects of humanity in an unfamiliar form. In addition to his creative practice, Gursky has been teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf since 2010.
• Gursky first embarked on his iconic The Stock Exchanges series in 1990, a project spanning 20 years and culminating in ten distinct images. Examples of the series are held in prominent international institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and Tate Modern in London. One of an edition of 6, another example of New York, Mercantile Exchange forms part of the Deutsche Börse Group Collection in Frankfurt.
• Exhibited widely, recent exhibitions of the artist include the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2012); National Art Center, Tokyo (2013); National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2014); Hayward Gallery, London (2018); Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany (2021); Museum Küppersmühle, Duisburg, Germany (2021–22) and Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul (2022).

 
 
ⁱ Nina Zimmer, Andreas Gursky, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, 2007-2008, p. 69.