MANHATTAN SKYLINE German Consulate General New York 2021

A Photo Installation by Regina Schmeken
which will be displayed to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks of 9/11

opening by Consul General David Gill

Schmeken’s two oversized photographs of the Manhattan skyline were taken in 1981, and have already been exhibited at the Maximiliansforum (a space of Museum Lenbachhaus) in Munich in November 2001, at Goethe-Institut New York in 2002 and 2006, as well as in 2011 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Complementing the two larger-than-life works is a tableau of 35 works from early series of paintings from the late 1970s and early 1980s entitled “Black is White”. They were created on journeys and during longer stays in Venice, Rome and Milan, Paris and New York.

French writer and philosopher François Aubral says about Schmekens early work: “One doesn’t forget the wonderful shoulders of the women and the mysterious portraits, like visions against the backdrop of New York, exaggerated and inexorable: human fragility at the sight of mechanical modernity, technological and cold. A critical and sensitive eye holds on to the dream without ever paralyzing. Thus the faces appear unreal as if from fantasy.”

September 14, 2021 to February 22, 2022

Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany
871 United Nations Plaza
New York, NY 10017
USA