Supervisions consists of huge “ground-scapes”. Using a digital camera rigged about two meters high, Gefeller systematically records every square meter of the surface of a special terrain: a parking lot, stadium, abandoned office, racetrack, or baseball field. This information is then combined into a mosaic-like grid, which the artist transforms into a seamless plane.

Gefeller sees uniquely. His vision is fresh; he imagines spaces crammed with detail, filling the rectangle with a seeming infinity of information.

The works are innovative and at the same time they reference the whole history of art and photography from sequenced panoramas by Beato or Muybridge to NASA topographical collages of the moon.

Gefeller’s Driving Range, 2004 seems to be a constellation of white stars on a green expanse. Lottery Tickets, 2004 behaves like a J.M.W. Turner abstraction of a sunset, which you discover is a sweep of little pieces of paper scattered on a cobblestone street.

The Racetrack, 2004 holds the wall like a giant Renaissance trompe l’oiell mural. Closer up it suddenly presents – without perspective – a galaxy of details from Hong Kong newspaper ads for Chinese masseuses to a discarded Evian bottle.

The very large size of the Gefeller photographs adds to their presence and power while making them even more ambiguous and puzzling. This is the artist’s North American debut. He lives and works in Dusseldorf and he is known in Europe for Supervisions as well as earlier bodies of work, SOMA (Utopian landscapes) and Halbwertszeiten (Radioactive Half-Lives). Supervisions was published by DAP (Distributed Art Publishers) in 2005.