Cityscape

Cityscapes as an art form

Work in progress: Nature meets City I (2020-2021?)

This is growing into a new series: nature meets city – part cityscape part landscape.  Made a lot of cityscapes over the year and I started to notice two things that interested me the most. If I was working from a tower or so, those are mostly in the middle of the city – or what used to be an important point, like a harbor. And I had the tendency to zoom in on edge of the towns, its borders in the landscapes. Or, when standing outside of a city on a high place, I tended to focus on the borders from the other direction – or focus on patches of nature in the cities.

I know we can hardly call it nature with the anthropocene and all, but still.

Pictures taken in Hamburg and Berlin.

Hasenheide mirrored, aka ‘Breasts in Space’ (2019)

I am also using this as part of a Triptych with a story about the Berlin wall. This pretty much represents the entrance to the west, but with more garbage and more smoke. It is a proposal. I hope I get selected, I would like to do a large work again – the second version of ‘The Benediction Of Saint Stefan the Drunk’ was about the last one, in 2016.

For the story about the title, follow the link.

Materials: Fiber composite material, print, paint
Print: Litho archive Matte / Photolux Professional Matte 230 
Dimensions 30×40 cm

Tempelhof im neuen Mittelalter

I made a couple of high format images with cityscapes and lots of sky. Some people think the below part is a montage. No, it is not, this really happened on former Tempelhof airfield. And of course I edited this.

Materials: Fiber composite material, print, paint
Print: Photolux Professional Matte 230 
Dimensions 40×50 cm

Blue ink ornament with “Spots of light with teeth”

Materials: fibre composite material print, ink, paint, pigments, nail polish
Print: Litho archive matt
Dimensions: 85 cm * 65 cm

I tried my hand on smaller ornamental frames, and this is one of those that I like most. The other ones are red and white – but they are not finished yet. So there’s more to come.

Could turn them into a flag of sorts, the Dutch flag would be fitting maybe – even though I am totally not a nationalist. It got me thinking regarding the new Kleistpark price. Stay tuned.

Purple ornament 2015 [SOLD]

Finished this one in 2015 already, but exhibited it the first time in 2016. Unfortunately I did not yet know the right mixture of my fiber composite material to make it lighter (right now it needs heavy wood to keep it straight, not so with the new recipe).

Materials: Fiber composite material, print, paint, rusty screws
Print: Litho archive Matte
Dimensions: 120×140 cm

Monument for Berlin – AD 2050 (2014)

I wanted to show this during the ‘Roads to Europe‘ exhibition because I thought it would fit in there. Later we decided to use another image. Instead I decided to see this as the first in a new series using the same theme: dreams withering in a changing city, colorful flowers destroyed or floating in the wind, looking for more fertile grounds.

Saint R. (2012 – 2013)

Train tracks going through a city are at the same time part of the city and not part of the city: a city is build for people, but you can not live there, you are not even allowed there. Same goes for high ways, sub-way tunnels and garbage dumps. I sometimes use these places as symbols for the border lands of our society.

A border separates and also creates order: these people belong over there and we live over here, and -according to some-that is how it is supposed to be. Certain thinkers have pointed out that Europe has the tendency to create places where that what does not fit in society will be banished to, like the terminally ill, the mentally unstable, the disabled, those with grotesque appearances and the criminal minds. These are the places where that what is deemed unclean, unholy, non-rational and unacceptable is expelled to, surrounded by a set of boundaries of their own.

Most of the times people are put there against their will. But there are also people who choose to step outside of the grandeur Europe/the western world has to offer, and they try to create their own place of refuge with their own rules.

Prunx – CD Cover Artwork

A cd cover I made for a band called ‘Prunx’. One of the reasons we know each other is because of our passion for science fiction. I made illustrations for 6 of the 7 songs on the CD. They chose two. We met each other because we all loved Scifi movies. So I immediately knew what to make for them.

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Substantinopel

Made it for a band, as a CD cover, but liked this idea about a city under the earth so much, I have given much thought to creating a whole series, a complete project maybe. Never gotten to it. Yet. Who knows. It still reminds me of old SF books, the lost word, people living underground – with dinosaurs of course.

This one is in color, but in the end we used a black and white version. It was more punk that way.