Paris Montparnasse 1993

Andreas Gursky, born in 1955, made "Paris Montparnasse" with photography. It is a facade that gives the impression of a painting. I wonder what Gursky might have been thinking when he made it. This feels like a painting that's anti-painting, and one wonders about the labour that went into the making of it. Think about it. It’s a photo, so it's about capturing what is there, but in some ways, it's as painstaking as a painting and has the same serial quality as work by Agnes Martin or Gerhard Richter. The surface looks flat, but it has such a deep perspective. The piece is fascinating because each window is like a cell and each cell is an individual painting in itself. Like small abstract paintings, some squares are dark, some are light, and they are never exactly the same! The building is a conversation between all these windows.