The exhibition is, according to Moderna Museet, the largest retrospective of Gursky’s work to date. The write-up explains that showing such a large number of prints (more than 150) was possible only by Gursky agreeing to reprint several of the older pieces  in a smaller size. I guess that is clear enough. But then again, it isn’t. Gursky’s work, I thought, needed to be big; I associated him with photographs almost unbearably impressive, indulgent in boundless ambition. For decades Gursky has show us the patterns of human life, the grotesquely gorgeous result of our manipulation of the planet, an unemotional look at the world as it is.  When I think of Gursky, I think of cold empty Prada stores;  a panoramic view of Los Angeles by night, spread out like a space ship in the vast darkness; I think of the rotunda in the Stockholm public library, a cyclical pattern of human learning. Perhaps more than anything else, I think of stock exchanges and office towers, exquisitely composed gigantic images that have become symbols of globalized capitalism. During the recent Wall Street mess, I saw in my mind’s eye Gursky photographs when reading about mortgage backed securities and other incomprehensible verbal porridge. I might not have understood what was happening (then again, did anyone?) but I knew what it looked like. This was a cold mess, patterns repeating themselves in vast empty spaces barely containing the vacuity and silent angst at the heart of contemporary capitalism.

Most of the work in the Moderna exhibit are shown in the smaller size, and in some ways these pieces are like thumbnails or stand-ins, for the real thing. Showing the work this way is a surprisingly daring move on behalf of the artist and the museum, quite possibly a justified one, but one that needs to be acknowledged.  Ontologically, I guess the smaller prints function like reproductions in a book, and in some ways wandering around in this exhibit is like walking around in a Gursky coffee table book. With a real exhibition squeezed into it somehow. An odd, but not unpleasant, experience.

Gursky is a master of composition, and he bridges the gab between abstraction and representation, only to immediately tear it down again. Everything becomes patterns, humanity is seen as pattern-makers, but also fields of color and shapes, not much different from the artificial world we have created around us.  Gursky has always played with artificiality, and the fact that his images are digitally manipulated has been obvious. In his latest work, he takes this to a new level and creates entire spaces and compositions digitally, and these really do not work for me; the artificiality here is heavy handed and obtuse, not gestural and subtle.

Take Katedral I (2007) for instance. This image feels cheap, silly and cinematic in the worst possible way. It makes me think of the Da Vinci Code with its histrionics and overblown drama. The cathedral is loaded with both spiritual and (art) historical meaning, but here we are faced with the  Cliff-Notes version. The space so obviously computer generated that it makes my skin crawl.

Maybe it’s me, I always have a sense of disappointment when going to the cinema to see the latest state-of-the-art CGI movie, as it always looks so unbearably CGI. And it’s the same here: the medium is sitting there right on the surface and it’s limitations make my eyeballs ache.I want to be seduced, and this is the seduction equivalent of grabbing the only person left at the bar at 2 am when the lights are already turned on and the bartender is mopping the floor. It is desperate and a little pathetic.

Most of what’s on view here is fabulous of course and it is exciting to see Gursky develop his themes over a long period of time. One of the earliest images,  Kirchfeldstrasse (1980) is stunning. There is poetry and subtlety and mystery here. We’re looking at a window facing a brick wall, a symbol that could easily have become heavy handed and obvious but that Gursky pulls off with panache. It is a dead end but not just a dead end. The composition is perfectly balanced, a corner looking into a corner. It is not hysterical or dramatic but filled with a quiet tension. The space is clearly man-made, we are looking from one building right onto another, and everywhere there are traces of human life: patched paint, wallpaper, a brick wall. Despite this, it is devoid of human presence, or perhaps more accurately, that the human is such an integral part of his environment and vice versa that it is impossible to think of the two separately.

Ratingen Swimmingpool (1987) is one of my all time favourite photographs, I can look at this forever. It is so artificial and strange; an absolutely ubiquitous scene in an average small town, tremendously unspectacular. One can’t help but notice that we, the human race, make that around us unnatural. And again the patterns; the pool a shape of turquoise, the surrounding landscape shapes of green and grey. Just as the sunbathing people are patterns of skin and bathing suits, repeated but not granted any more attention than what surrounds them. Another great piece, which I would have liked to see large is Paris Montparnasse (1993), heartbreakingly beautiful like a Mondrian painting, with its horizontal and vertical lines. It is ideal and gorgeous yet one knows that living here would be hellish.

Perhaps it is the fact that Gursky is so amazingly spot-on in most of his work that the new pieces bother me so much. I am not indifferent to the cocoon-like spaces, the cathedral, or the communist/fascist rallies, I positively dislike them.  I feel almost personally offended the way I did when Dylan started doing ads for Victoria’s Secret. He should have known better, as should Gursky.

But again, when he’s good, he’s great, and what really blew my mind were three small pieces hanging together as a sort of triptych: Turner Collection (1995), Supernova (1999), May Day III (1998).  I am not sure whether to credit Gursky or the curator for the installation, but combining these three was a stroke of genius. Suddenly Gursky’s recent digital monstrosities are forgotten. They don’t matter. Nothing matters, only this, right here. These three images seem to me a distillation of what it means to be human, of the frightful and fabulous realization that we are all, despite our stubborn individuality and creative uniqueness, just a part of a massive universe, a grain of sand in Sahara, a piss in the Mississippi (you pick your metaphor).Our desperate search for meaning, in art, in the night skies, in (drug-infused) ritualistic communion with others, is perhaps ridiculous, but it is what it is. We are all alone, yet in this together; all of it matters and none of it matters. Tremendously.