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Andreas Gursky started out mostly shooting monochrome landscapes using a handheld camera, but during the nineties he transitioned his style. He started producing the epic panoramas for which he is now famous. Out went traditional film and in came digitally stitched images that captured in intricate color and precision financial markets, factories, Amazon warehouses, discount shops, Olympic skiers, and the audience at a Madonna concert.

“My photographs,” he recalls, “were being purchased for increasingly higher prices.” Indeed, his rising status in the art scene was evident in his photographs shown inside Prada and Gucci stores. Subsequently, in the year 2011, Gursky’s 1999 color image called Rhein II, a sweeping view of the river winding across flat fields near the city of Düsseldorf, stunned bidders when it sold for $4.3m (£2.7 million), almost twice its estimate, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold. “How does one handle a situation like that?” he says. Rhein II retained the title until 2022, when it was surpassed by the artist Man Ray’s surrealist masterpiece named Le Violin d’Ingres, which went for over twelve million dollars.

The former chancellor didn’t want to be shot from behind. I guess it was not a very charming proposal

Gursky’s massive pieces are incredibly intricate, frequently taking many years to complete. On average, he finishes three annually. He creates them by taking a series of pictures, at times at various places, then suturing the sections he feels fit together into a unified, impossible photograph. Given their scale, intricacy, and dimensions, Gursky’s works have been compared to artworks. The scale is crucial: “They are created as large as I can,” he states. “It is not possible to get bigger with current technology.” Viewers may not understand how much work goes into creating them – does that bother him? He shrugs.

Our conversation via Zoom but a week later we see each other at a London gallery, where he is setting up his new exhibition. There is an team of technicians and assistants working busily. Even though the display includes only 16 pieces, Gursky notes: “I believe I have never presented such diverse types of work.”

This was intentionally arranged in this manner, however. The exhibition includes an early work titled Gas Cooker, among his earliest works. Dating from the year 1980, the image gives a slightly elevated view of the hob at his student flatshare, its burners strangely illuminated. A different photograph depicts German activists in treetops demonstrating against the demolition of a village, their placard in German stating: “The scenery here is terrible.”

There’s a new, somber image of a illuminated metal block, a swansong to the Rhine region’s precarious metal production. Additionally, there’s among Gursky’s initial smartphone photos, a lighthearted diptych of his wife at home placing a block to a stack of the game Jenga, with a box on her head. In short, this exhibition reveals different facets to the artist from Germany, more gentle, personal and unplanned – a notable difference to the distant observer, the large-format creator.

I found myself under huge pressure to create for the show – and then an image appeared unexpectedly

A few months ago, he called gallerist Jay Joplin and asked to delay the show. “He said, ‘No way, no deal – I have reserved for you the most favorable slot in the whole year. You must cope and get it done.’” Therefore he created ten new works for the show. “That’s a lot for the way I create.”

For someone who has devoted 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 smartphone. The exhibition contains several smaller-scale, more diaristic photos, from a recent addition to the family to a folded towel fallen into a bath. Shot from above, the towel appears suspended in mid-air, with droplets of water around its neatly creased shape. Get up close and you can see the digital elements blurring at the edges.

It sounds like the sort of approach that only a extremely renowned creator could get away with. But it highlights what Gursky has consistently been fascinated by: how we see the environment in disconnected images. “That towel fell into the bathtub by accident,” he explains. “Underwater, it looked like magical realism. I was captivated by the way it appeared. I had been under huge pressure to create for the exhibition, when an image fell into my lap. I took the shot and there it was.”

The towel appears alongside a different recent work: a remake of a classic photograph made in the year 1993. He says the new shot is better. It shows an apartment building with over a thousand windows in the city of Paris. The revised work consists of several pictures taken in winter, meaning the sunlight was not too glaring and the curtains were mostly drawn back, revealing dozens of tiny vignettes into people’s lives. As you move closer, increasing details become visible – you could devote considerable time looking at it. But move back and it’s a gorgeously rich abstract expressionist artwork, a composition of geometric shapes, from black to soft hues.

“The work explores the private world of the building,” he says. “It is a panopticon of routines, tastes, and how residents choose to furnish their flats.” It’s also a contradiction of an image – the work provides a view of almost the whole edifice, which would be impossible to observe in real life. It is the result of a collection of photographs of segments of the structure, shot from the hotel across the street then merged into one.

Placed together, the two works demonstrate how far-ranging Gursky’s interests and inspirations are. Another new work is certain to cause a some interest: a photograph of a well-known British musician. The artist does not reveal the identity, though they met via his gallerist. The musician was a fan of Gursky whereas the artist, in turn, had “never heard of him”. Still, they developed a friendship and Gursky joined the star on a concert tour. The image is taken from behind the musician as he plays in a shimmering Gucci ensemble. Beyond is the stadium crowd, a sea of glittering, shouting, screaming faces and iPhones. Gursky previously asked the former German leader if he could photograph an picture from a comparable angle but she declined. “I suppose,” he remarks, “it wasn’t a very charming offer – to capture her from behind