Visual Arts ANDREAS GURSKY Tate Gallery, Liverpool

The woman beside me is troubled. She's looked at the huge picture close-to, and now she's drawn back to survey it from a distance. But she's still uncomfortable. She wants to know what it is she's looking at. The label tells her it's a photograph of the interior of the Siemens factory in Karlsruhe, but she's perplexed by its scale and context. Why, she thinks, is she standing in a museum, looking at what might otherwise be a piece of corporate advertising?

Such a reaction to Andreas Gursky's work is not unusual. Gursky, one of Germany's most respected and interesting artists has a reputation for using photography in a unique way. He looks to commonplace images of the modern world - the factory, the tower block, the landscape invaded by man. Working with a 4x5in camera, Gursky makes large colour prints which he finishes with subtle alterations in tone to increase the intensity and impact without detracting from the illusion of reality.

At their best, Gursky's photographs are enormous, suffocating presences which transport the viewer deep into their impossible perfection, transforming the everyday into the monumental.

Many of his works reinterpret conventional pictorial formats in terms of photography. Thus the image of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange is presented as a diptych and is of a size comparable to the 15th-century altar panels it calls to mind. But, rather than a panoply of saints paying homage to the Madonna and Child, we are confronted with scores of computers arranged in a massive triangle, their red-clad operators quite as deferential to the invisible god of money as the donors in any Renaissance votive painting. Similarly, Gursky's photograph of Salerno might be seen as a Claude for the 1990s, complete with artfully layered landscape. But instead of the Embarkation for Cythera on some ethereal barque, Gursky offers us the promised departure of thousands of new motorcars, bound for the towns and villages of provincial Italy.

If, however, they invite allusions to the Old Masters, Gursky's images are not lacking in wit. In Paris, Montparnasse for example, he presents the facade of an 18-storey tower block - a fascinating and distracting grid of windows, in which, before our gaze, the colours and tones of blinds and glass gradually set up a rhythm. It is, of course, no coincidence he should choose Paris to demonstrate an everyday artform created apparently unawares. Here, in the capital of art, Gursky has captured a spontaneous Mondrian. This understanding of the aesthetic by-products of our urban environment underpins much of Gursky's work and is particularly evident in his night-time study of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Having enticed us at a distance on the level of a colour-field abstract, on closer acquaintance this undeniably beautiful work of art offers an entirely different form of engagement as we peer through its windows into the individual worlds of its occupants.

Perhaps it is the utter clarity with which Gursky portrays the world that makes his images so effectively disturbing. His universe is at once rational, ordered and controllable. Yet at the same time - by the inclusion of figures, particularly against the backdrop of a sublime landscape - Gursky awakens us to the ludicrousness of the idea that mankind can ever hope to control something so vast, so fundamental. Gursky in effect, has redefined the "pathetic fallacy" for the late 20th century.