‘“You’re like New York. An island“. Being like an island and thus revolving around oneself is how Woody Allen highlighted a characteristic of his city in the film Annie Hall, something most residents and visitors of this city feel to be extremely contradictory yet at the same time very intriguing. In his portraits of the city, Jürgen Schmiedekampf, a European in New York, tries to lend an adequate and reflected expression to its all-absorbing movement, portraits which one might also think of as recorded notes with lyrical sparks.

The pictures mirror a reciprocal process, not only as a series of works but also in themselves. Scanning the city with his camera, the artist makes a record, mainly at eye-level, of places at a certain point in time in their situational movement. The distanced yet committed viewpoint of the artist seeks what is uniquely imaginative-and finds it in an unusual way. Jürgen Schmiedekampf has discovered that “the city paints for him“ . He is not a detached observer hovering “above it all“; distance is removed or not even established in the first place. The street life resembles a play with rapid changes of scenes, situations fluctuate at lighting speed, creating a certain sense of positional uncertainty.

For Schmiedekampf, photos-even more so than in earlier years-are only raw material. Time and space, the aesthetic diversity of billboards and “asphalt paintings“ can only be captured by the paintbrush. It proceeds in an agitated and expressive manner, pointillistic and informal, but at the same time producing distinct contours. Each work, regardless of the format, is established as a continuum of space. Backward and forward movement flows, the colors are vivid but do not restrict the viewer’s attention to any particular motif.