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The artist Andreas Gursky began his career mostly capturing black and white scenes with a portable camera, however in the nineties he shifted his style. He began creating the grand panoramas for which he is now renowned. He moved away from traditional film and embraced digitally combined compositions depicting in detailed detail and colour financial markets, factories, Amazon warehouses, discount shops, winter athletes, and the audience at a Madonna concert.

“My photographs,” he remembers, “were being purchased for increasingly higher prices.” In fact, his rising status in the art world was evident in his images shown inside Prada and Gucci stores. Subsequently, in the year 2011, Gursky’s 1999 image titled Rhein II, a sweeping view of the river winding across level plains near Dusseldorf, stunned auctioneers when it sold for $4.3m (£2.7m), nearly twice its estimate, establishing it as the most expensive photograph ever sold. “How do you deal with a situation like that?” he remarks. Rhein II held that record until 2022, when it was overtaken by the artist Man Ray’s iconic surrealist work named Le Violin d’Ingres, which sold for $12.4 million.

The former chancellor didn’t want to be shot from behind. I suppose it wasn’t a very charming offer

Gursky’s huge pieces are extremely intricate, frequently requiring many years to complete. On average, he finishes three a year. He produces them by taking a series of pictures, sometimes at different locations, then suturing the sections he feels work well into one single, seemingly unreal image. Considering their ambition, intricacy, and dimensions, Gursky’s pictures have been likened to paintings. The size is crucial: “They are created as large as I can,” he says. “It is not possible to get bigger technically.” People may not realize how much effort goes into making them – is that a concern for him? He is unconcerned.

We are speaking via Zoom but a short time after we see each other at a London gallery, where he is setting up his new exhibition. He is accompanied by an team of technicians and helpers working busily. Even though the exhibition features just sixteen works, Gursky says: “I believe I’ve ever presented such different kinds of work.”

It was intentionally arranged this way, though. The exhibition features an early work titled Gas Cooker, among his earliest works. Created in the year 1980, the image offers a somewhat raised perspective of the stovetop at his student flatshare, its three rings eerily illuminated. A different photograph shows German activists in trees protesting against the demolition of a village, their placard in the German language saying: “The scenery here is terrible.”

There’s a recent, somber image of a illuminated metal block, a swansong to the Rhine’s precarious metal production. Additionally, there’s among Gursky’s initial smartphone photos, a lighthearted two-part image of his spouse at home placing a block to a stack of the game Jenga, with a container on her head. Overall, this exhibition reveals different facets to the German artist, more gentle, personal and spontaneous – a notable difference to the detached viewer, the mass-scale creator.

I found myself facing significant stress to create for the show – then an photograph fell into my lap

Recently, he called gallerist his gallery representative and requested to postpone the exhibition. “He said, ‘No way, it is not possible – I have reserved for you the most favorable slot in the whole year. You must manage and get it done.’” Therefore he made 10 new pictures for the show. “That’s a lot for the manner I create.”

Despite being an artist who has spent most of his career meticulously constructing photographs that couldn’t be real, Gursky, currently seventy years old, appears to find joy in the ease of the iPhone. The show includes a number of more intimate, more diaristic snapshots, from a newborn family member to a neatly arranged towel that dropped into a bathtub. Shot from overhead, the linen appears floating in space, with bubbles of moisture around its still folded shape. Look closely and you can see the digital elements blurring at the borders.

This may seem like the kind of thing only a extremely renowned artist could successfully present. Yet it highlights what Gursky has consistently been fascinated by: how we see the world in photographic fragments. “The towel dropped into the bath by mistake,” he says. “Underwater, it resembled magical realism. I was captivated by the way it looked. I had been under huge pressure to create for the exhibition, then an picture fell into my lap. I pressed click and it was complete.”

The towel appears alongside another new image: a remake of a quintessential work created in the year 1993. He says the new shot is better. It depicts an apartment building with over a thousand windows in the city of Paris. The new version is composed of multiple photos taken in the colder season, so that the sunlight was not too glaring and the curtains were largely open, allowing dozens of small glimpses into everyday existence. When viewed up close, more and more elements emerge – one might spend hours examining it. But move back and it’s a beautifully rich abstract expressionist artwork, a composition of squares, from dark to pastel-coloured.

“It’s about the inner life of the structure,” he comments. “It is a panopticon of habits, tastes, and how residents like to decorate their flats.” It’s also a paradox of an photograph – the work provides a perspective of almost the whole edifice, which would be impossible to see in reality. It is the result of a series of images of segments of the building, photographed from the building across the street then merged together.

Placed together, the two pictures demonstrate how far-ranging Gursky’s interests and influences are. An additional recent piece is certain to generate a some interest: a picture of a famous English pop star. He won’t disclose who, although they met through Joplin. The musician was a fan of Gursky while the artist, in turn, had “was unfamiliar with him”. Still, they became friends and Gursky joined the star on a concert tour. The picture is taken from behind the musician as he plays in a glittering Gucci ensemble. Beyond is the audience, a mass of shimmering, cheering, yelling people and iPhones. Gursky previously asked Angela Merkel if he could shoot an picture from a comparable angle but the former German chancellor refused. “I guess,” he remarks, “it wasn’t a very charming offer – to capture her from behind