New York
At the beginning of the 20th century, New York represented the gateway to the American continent with the passage through Ellis Island. Today, this gathering of people from diverse backgrounds is now one of the most important, and most visited cities in the world . Cinema, literature, and visual arts have tried to capture the unique complexity of the city that never sleeps.
From Lewis Wickes Hine's famous photograph of workers having lunch sitting on a steel beam at a skyscraper construction site to Vivian Maier's street scenes, the city's fascination lives on today.
And yet, of the immunrable artworks depicting the city, none of them has managed to fully represent the buzzing atmosphere of the big apple, a place full of history, dreams, disillusions and skyscrapers.
It is hard to depict all these things, but perhaps even harder to choose only one aspect to focus on. Because what would one choose? To successfully capture New York's essence and unique atmosphere, the artist has to consider its colours, avenues, the diversity of its crowds, its decadence. Then they must depict Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Tower and the Empire State Building as well as touch upon the scars of terrorism or the asphalt vibrations created by the metro rumbling through the underground tunnels. But New York is also a city filled with joy, music, success, a city of love and with an intoxicating atmosphere, it can be as red as the Brooklyn Bridge or as green as Central Park's leaves. In short, it is a city that goes beyond words and even perhaps beyond images.
Gottfried Salzmann's work highlights these complexities. A multidisciplinary artist, he works on fluidity and transparency, calling himself a painter of water. He produces artworks that hover at the frontier of drawing, prints, and photography, evanescent and surrealist. As for painting, Daniel Castan and Patrice Palacio create urban landscapes of empty streets, where the vapour that surrounds the contours of buildings reveals the city's unstoppable activity. On the other hand, Jerome Liebling, a street photographer, focuses on the individual, like as a child leaning against a 1949 car, taken by surprise by the photographer's gaze.
These artists take us on a wonderful journey to New York City and their artworks leave us wondering: are we really seeing New York as it is or are these images only showing us the city as it appears through the artists' eyes ?
