"The Gursky Exhibition is brilliant, you MUST see it!" a good photographer friend reported back to me after visiting with her baby soon after it opened.
Her advice was to book tickets in advance and aim to go at the opening time - 11am. This was great advice and I would say the same - plan in advance - it gets busy.
I was a little unsure about taking my 4-year-old but figured it would be great mother-daughter bonding time - afterwards there was the promise of a new sticker book and pizza.
So we headed off together to see the work of Andreas Gursky at the newly renovated Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre.
Amazon
2016
This exhibition explores the work of the photographer over the past four decades and is the first major retrospective of his work in the UK.
There are over 60 of the artist’s photographs, from the 1980s through to his most recent work. The images are packed full of detail, an Amazon warehouse, 99 cent store and huge, impressive landscapes. There's also the fascinating Paris, Montparnasse (1993), showing all 750 flats in the city’s largest apartment block, created using multiple shots taken from two different vantage points. It's one of Gursky's early examples of digital manipulation which he started experimenting with in 1992.
Review
2015
SH- 1 Iron Man (2013) one of Gursky's more recent works
Pyongyang VI
2017 (2007)
Tokyo
2017
Though I originally planned to sneak out and see this exhibition on my own (leaving my young girls at home) I loved having my 4-year-old for company.
Although losing patience towards the end, she was really well behaved while we looked round and I loved watching her taking it all in. It was wonderful sitting and chatting on her bed later that evening, deciding which was her favourite photograph (the one with the cows, in case you're interested).
If you get the chance to see this exhibition, it's well worth it. The images (many of which are large in scale) are beautifully exhibited over several floors of the Hayward. I enjoyed it so much and plan to go back.
Andreas Gursky runs until 22 April 2018