Andreas Gursky goes on show in Berlin

Andreas Gursky and an assistant in front of ‘Ocean I’ in his Düsseldorf studio

In Andreas Gursky’s Düsseldorf studio, I peer into the inky-blue depths of the Indian Ocean. The water all but fills the “canvas”, with the outer limits of the continents intruding just inside the frame. On the wall behind me sprawls the Pacific Ocean and, in the room next door, an image of Antarctica is taking shape. Gursky’s Ocean series, which will go on show at the end of this month at Sprüth Magers in Berlin, is the latest offering from the artist whose large-scale photographic images unfailingly capture the zeitgeist. Recent subjects have ranged from rock concerts and Formula One to North Korean parades and Prada shoes.

And just before the financial crash, Gursky’s 1999 study of a supermarket, “99 Cent II”, sold at Sotheby’s for $3.3m, the highest price paid to date for a single photographic work.

The idea for the new work arose on a flight to Australia, when Gursky, 55, began to re-imagine the graphic on the flight monitor as a picture. “I was looking the whole night at the blue surface of the ocean,” he explains. “And in a way, I saw the image in front of me on the monitor.” It’s typical of the way Gursky works – images in the media often spark ideas – but also a new departure, in that the six pictures are not based on his own photography. This time, he has combined satellite images with material found on the internet in pictures “painted” entirely on his computer.

“The satellite images are completely dark around the edges,” Gursky continues, as we survey Australia’s east coast in the Pacific Ocean picture. “It took months to create the area between the water and continents.” As he points out details such as a patch of dust he’s created over a bushfire just south of Brisbane it’s easy to see why. The pictures are underpinned by meticulous research: in one Antarctica picture, for example, he has “updated” the coastline to take account of a large chunk of ice breaking free; elsewhere, he explains, the little swirls that look like currents are tiny creatures called krill.

If this makes Gursky sound like a hyperrealist, nothing could be further from the truth. “This is my interpretation,” he says. “I am not interested in an objective view of the world; I am interested in a painterly view. In terms of the composition, there is an affinity with Clyfford Still, or maybe Barnett Newman.” He pauses before adding: “In general, I must say that photography is not anymore so important for me.”

What? The man who’s arguably the greatest photographic artist of his generation (Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman are his nearest rivals) has just said photography is no longer important to him. Then I reflect on his oeuvre, I think of the ocean pictures, and realise that, for years now, Gursky has engaged in a dialogue with painting. Photography has only ever been one part of the story. But as a “painter” of modern life, he has used photography to inject a sense of reality into his compositions. As he puts it: “The Pacific Ocean picture has the formal qualities of a painting, but what makes it more interesting is that you can imagine at the same time that it’s our real world.”

Gursky initially used digital technology in the 1990s simply for touching up. Then he plunged in. Works such as “Madonna I”, from 2001, or his shot of the Cocoon music venue in Frankfurt, from 2008, are immensely complex pictures based on hundreds of images. “I would compare the process to that of a writer,” he says, the glint in his eye suggesting it’s journalists he has in mind. “You take a train journey. You look out the window and get an impression, but when you write it down in the evening it will be what you imagine. In my case, I take lots of photographs, then, in the evening, bring them together. That seems unconventional, because somehow we are still fixed on ‘straight’ photography.”

As a conceptual cycle, Gursky’s Ocean pictures mark him out as a child of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the photographers famous for their studies of industrial architecture, who taught at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakadamie and were hailed as pioneers of conceptual art. Gursky joined their class in the early 1980s and their rigorous methodology, with its fixed rules about perspective, distance and discipline, is lodged in his soul. But other influences are embedded there as well.

Gursky proved he could follow the Bechers’ rules, then break them. He gained his diploma with a set of pictures of corporate security guards, which Bernd Becher loved. “It was exactly his method,” Gursky recalls. “But at the same time I realised I had to escape from this – and I started doing landscape pictures.”

Before going to Düsseldorf, Gursky studied at Essen’s Folkwang University of the Arts under Otto Steinert, whose approach grew out of the Bauhaus and was rather more subjective than that of the Bechers. Is there a bit of Steinert still there somewhere? “Yes, I think so. Some pictures of mine have a narrative aspect; others are more abstract.” He cites as an example, “Beelitz” (2007), a helicopter view of asparagus pickers. “The image looks completely abstract. Then you approach and see human beings. What they are doing is not predictable, when you are flying in a helicopter, so ... Zufall – chance, accident – is also important in my work. I could have a very formal concept, but I think it’s more interesting that you play with these accidents.”

Radicalised in his youth by the political upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gursky refused to do military service in 1975. “My generation was against what was going on in society,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine that I would work in advertising. Today, I am a political being, but I try to avoid it obviously in my work.” But your new work is very political, I suggest. Aren’t the Ocean pictures all about climate change? “Yes,” he agrees. “But it’s not didaktisch. It’s a more subtle play. I am showing the world as it has existed for thousands of years. I don’t show how it might be about to change very soon. But of course you can imagine how it will change.”

Gursky’s recent work has taken him to Bahrain, Dubai, Kuwait, Japan – even North Korea. I ask whether the effort expended on getting permission for such shoots adds to the interest of the projects, but for Gursky it clearly just adds stress. So much so that memories of the carefree days he spent in Essen armed with a Leica, à la Cartier-Bresson, still exert a powerful draw. “Sometimes I have the romantic idea of taking the car and driving through some nice landscape, taking pictures,” he concludes wistfully. “Doing the whole post-production is so much work that straight photography is like going on holiday.”

Andreas Gursky, Sprüth Magers Berlin, April 30-June 12. www.spruethmagers.com