Unlike veduta painting \u2013 where the goal was to render city views with the highest degree of accuracy \u2013 contemporary art treats the city as a source of inspiration for individual perception. The exhibition \u201cCityscapes\u201d brings five distinct artistic voices into conversation. Through dense composition or deliberate omission, each artist creates moods that go beyond simply depicting the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jan Sch\u00fcler\u2019s meticulous paintings reduce the urban scenes he photographs to their fundamental elements. Details are left out between smooth surfaces and sharply delineated forms and colour fields. Stylised poles, fences, trees, and clouds accentuate the character of each scene. This process of reduction keeps his cityscapes recognisable by location: Berlin\u2019s Tempelhof Airport, the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, or a lock in Gie\u00dfen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sarah Haffner developed, for her compositions marked by distinct forms and a striking palette, a hybrid technique of oil paint and egg tempera. In her work, colour carries its own weight: it is not applied to reflect nature, but used expressively, and with spatial presence. Colour carries emotion; for Sarah Haffner, blue and blue-green are mirrors of the soul, emblems of melancholy. Her abstracted urban landscapes \u2013 faceless apartment buildings and firewalls across seasons and times of day \u2013 or her commuter train scenes are shaped by the city she called home for decades: Berlin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Franziskus Wendels has spent over thirty years examining how artificial light behaves in darkness. In many of his image series, the city is central: its lights during a plane\u2019s nighttime landing, or the glow of signs above cinemas and petrol stations. These nearly black, monochrome paintings \u2013 where no brushstrokes remain \u2013 are illuminated by colour in endlessly shifting hues. Their glow is achieved through a unique technique Wendels has refined over time, blending oil and lacquer and dissolving pigments. A final glaze, tinted in subtly varying tones, gives the light its flickering effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
G. L. Gabriel conveys the fleeting atmosphere of the city through stylistic and painterly devices, applied with a bold, expressive stroke. She applies this approach equally to a monumental four-metre canvas of the Glienicke Bridge and a smaller painting of New York, where cast-iron fire escapes and rooftop water tanks conjure the city\u2019s distinctive local flair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eric Keller builds his urban cosmos from casual glimpses \u2013 riverside walkways, athletic fields, parking lots, and railway crossings. His motifs are composed of large areas of colour, built up tone on tone from thin layers of oil glaze in various shades of grey, blue, violet, or ochre. The slight blurring he applies creates evocative spaces of memory. Working on the painting, he returns in his imagination to scenes he observed, but their exact location remains his secret.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this exhibition, the city appears not as an architectural construct, but as an atmospheric space \u2013 a surface onto which melancholy, longing, and memory are projected through the subjective gaze of the five artists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
G. L. Gabriel<\/strong> (b. 1958) studied painting at the Berlin University of the Arts (Hochschule der K\u00fcnste Berlin) with K. H. H\u00f6dicke, completing her studies in 1981 as his master student. In 1979, she became the youngest founding member of the Galerie am Moritzplatz \u2013 a self-organized gallery of young artists who would later gain international recognition as the \u201cNeue Wilde.\u201d Gabriel has received multiple fellowships, and works of hers are held by the Berlinische Galerie, the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, and the Federal Republic of Germany\u2019s collection of contemporary art, among others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sarah Haffner<\/strong> (1940\u20132018) grew up in England, where her parents had fled in 1938 because of her mother\u2019s Jewish heritage. In 1954, she and her family returned to Berlin, where she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule f\u00fcr bildende K\u00fcnste). Her works are held by the Berlinische Galerie, the German Historical Museum Berlin, the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, and the German Bundestag\u2019s art collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eric Keller<\/strong> (b. 1985) studied painting in Nuremberg, Dresden, and Leipzig, completing his degree in 2018 as a master student of Professor Annette Schr\u00f6ter at the Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule f\u00fcr Grafik und Buchkunst) Leipzig. His works are part of collections including the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Municipal Gallery Dresden, and the Federal Republic of Germany\u2019s collection of contemporary art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jan Sch\u00fcler<\/strong> (b. 1963) studied painting at the D\u00fcsseldorf Art Academy (Kunstakademie D\u00fcsseldorf) with Rissa and Fritz Schwegler, completing his studies in 1992 as Schwegler\u2019s master student. In 1996 he received the Sponsorship Prize for Fine Art from the city of D\u00fcsseldorf. His works can be found in numerous private and public collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Franziskus Wendels<\/strong> (b. 1960) studied fine art and Catholic theology in Mainz and Montpellier after completing high school and training as a baker. He later studied philosophy and art history at the Free University of Berlin. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, and his works are held in major museum and corporate collections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Unlike veduta painting \u2013 where the goal was to render city views with the highest degree of accuracy \u2013 contemporary art treats the city as a source of inspiration for individual perception. The exhibition \u201cCityscapes\u201d brings five distinct artistic voices into conversation. Through dense composition or deliberate omission, each artist creates moods that go beyond […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":44045,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"ausstellen-text.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-44068","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/poll-berlin.de\/galerie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/44068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/poll-berlin.de\/galerie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/poll-berlin.de\/galerie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poll-berlin.de\/galerie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poll-berlin.de\/galerie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44068"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/poll-berlin.de\/galerie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/44068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44460,"href":"https:\/\/poll-berlin.de\/galerie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/44068\/revisions\/44460"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poll-berlin.de\/galerie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/44045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/poll-berlin.de\/galerie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}