Beautiful and bleak: The supersized photos of Andreas Gursky

"It couldn't be better," says Andreas Gursky, Germany's most famous photographer, as he surveys the hanging of his new show at London's revamped Hayward Gallery.

The Hayward reopens this week after a major renovation that's revived this iconic but derided building. This Gursky retrospective is an ideal curtain raiser for the relaunch of Britain's leading gallery of contemporary art.

Gursky works on a grand scale - his photos are measured in metres, not centimetres. The biggest had to be brought in by crane, but now they're safely inside they feel perfectly at home here.

"They need space," Gursky tells me, and the new Hayward has space aplenty. The old false ceilings have been removed, flooding the upper floors with natural light. The Hayward's brutalist architecture isn't to everybody's taste, but it's the perfect forum for Gursky's unsentimental eye.

We're standing infront of Amazon, one of the more recent pictures in this exhibition. It's not a photo of the river, but one of the online behemoth's innumerable warehouses. Gursky isn't interested in creating pretty pictures - he photographs the world we really live in.

In Les Mées, the scenery is obscured by ugly solar panels. In Bahrain I, the barren splendour of the desert is scarred by a Formula One racetrack. 99 Cent depicts the garish interior of a US thrift store. Is this an indictment of mindless consumerism? It certainly feels that way, but Gursky merely tells me he liked the trashy colours.

Gursky's view of modern life is bleak but his images are strangely beautiful. They're also remarkably complex. "His pictures are really layered," says the show's curator, Ralph Rugoff. "He's constantly making pictures that comment on picture making itself."

And he's constantly evolving. "The most recent pictures in this show are actually inspired by mobile phone photography. They talk about what's happening to the image in the era of the mobile phone." Watch this space.