The Entire City - Die ganze Stadt - La ville entière

The exhibition “The Entire City” takes its title from a work by Max Ernst, with its at once impressive and oppressive vision of a dream metropolis where natural space and cultural space merge. Urban culture and urban life also are the subject matter of our artists. They depict “their” city, the centre as well as the periphery, from entirely individual perspectives. They do not simply portray what can be seen; rather, they illuminate aspects of cultural situations, and also of social and political situations, in Germany today. Their common theme concerns questions of human identity and that of the urban environment.
Zoltán Jókay, Andreas Rost, Maria Sewcz, Ulrich Wüst, Tomo Yamaguchi and Eva Bertram each approach urban culture, the current social and cultural state of the world they live in, with an individual yet distinctive eye: each records in his or her own way aspects of their reality that attract their attention. In so doing, they capture disparate components – cityscape, architecture, portrait, contemporary history, society – at times turning their gaze inward to people’s private spheres, at times looking outward at inner city or suburban spaces. But always they single out everyday situations, never the exceptional or exalted moments. And precisely for that reason, they enable their pictures to tell stories.

Yet these photographers see themselves less as documentarists than as artists who are developing their own pictorial aesthetic, without staging their subjects or violating the dignity of those portrayed. And their works unite artistic quality with readability on a number of different levels. Along with the topical information about present-day Germany that their pictures convey, the artist-photographers stand for contemporary artistic strategies that use narrative, representational structures to afford comprehensible access to their worlds of images.