Sha Tin
Andreas Gursky
German, born 1955
1994
A large chromogenic color photograph in which Andreas Gursky frames the Sha Tin horse-racing course from a distant, elevated vantage to turn a bustling sporting crowd and its surroundings into an ordered study of scale, pattern, and spectacle.
You’re first struck by horizontal layers—the dense, confetti-strewn crowd at the bottom, the racetrack and scoreboards across the middle, and a row of repetitive high-rises against rolling hills—so that individual people dissolve into a precise, almost graphic landscape.
Monumental in size and compositional clarity, this work helped push late-20th-century photography toward an examination of globalization and mass culture, using photographic detail and scale to reveal how modern life is organized and consumed.
Medium
Chromogenic print
Dimensions
70 7/8 × 92 1/2" (180 × 235 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel
Accession
76.1995
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
