Dimensions: frame: 2063 x 3575 x 50 mm image: 1564 x 3083 mm
Copyright: © Courtesy Monika Sprueth Galerie, Koeln / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London 2014 | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: We’re looking at Andreas Gursky's "The Rhine II," a photograph held in the Tate collection. What’s your first reaction to this image? Editor: It’s strangely calming, almost meditative. The composition is so simple, horizontal bands of green, gray water, and a muted sky. It’s like a landscape distilled to its essence. Curator: Gursky’s known for digitally manipulating his images. He’s removed any distracting elements, like buildings or people, to achieve this effect. Editor: Right, it’s not quite real, is it? This feels more like a constructed idea of nature than a found one. Like a digitally altered memory. Curator: His work prompts questions about the role of technology in our perception and idealization of the landscape. It's a photograph, but it’s also an intervention. Editor: It leaves me wondering about authenticity in art and how we define it when technology blurs the lines. Curator: Absolutely, and Gursky masterfully makes us question the boundary between reality and artifice. Editor: A beautiful and unnerving image; definitely a statement on our times.
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The Rhine II was produced in an edition of six; Tate owns the fifth in the series. This large colour photograph depicts a stretch of the river Rhine outside Düsseldorf. The image is immediately legible as a view of a straight stretch of water, but it is also an abstract configuration of horizontal bands of colour of varying widths. The horizon line bisects the picture almost exactly in the middle. Above it the overcast sky is a blue-grey. In the bottom half of the image, the river is a glassy, unbroken band between green stripes of grass. At the bottom of the picture in the immediate foreground is a narrow path. Below it is another thin band of manicured green grass.
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