NY, I'm Longing To Stray

Many myths have developed around New York City. It is the city that never sleeps, the city of the American Dream, the city that prepares you for any other experience in life - if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.
The connection between Duane Michals, Gabriele Croppi and Pete Marifoglou is their passion to capture exactly New York City's special, unique and magic spirit, but also its intimidating size and the loneliness that can arise even though the streets are always crowded. In the same way that Frank Sinatra sang about his longing to stray through New York City, the exhibition invites visitors to stray through the works and to follow the gaze of artists from three generations with their different perspectives on this unique city.

Duane Michals (1932) is regarded as one of the leading photographic innovators of his time, renowned above all for his narrative sequences of handwritten texts and photographs. From the moment he settled in Manhattan, in 1958, with the intention of studying graphic design, the metropolitan environment in which he found himself exerted a powerful spell on his creative imagination. In the following years he began to document New York City in an unfamiliar guise, virtually empty of inhabitants at dawn or dusk. In deeply evocative black-and-white images he depicted storefronts and interiors; deserted stations, subway cars, funfairs and arcades; derelict markets, vacant theatres and diners. Achingly nostalgic, the photographs in Empty New York show us the city frozen in time.
These photographs also reflect Duane Michals' admiration for the work of French photographer Eugène Atget who memorably photographed the architecture and streets of Paris. “It was a fortuitous event for me to discover the work of Eugène Atget in a book. I became so enchanted by the intimacy of the rooms and streets and people he photographed that I found myself looking at twentieth-century New York in the early morning through his nineteenth-century eyes.” Because of this admiration, Duane Michals dedicated his recently published book Empty New York to Atget. Only a very few of Duane Michals’ Empty New York images have been published or exhibited before.
Since 1958 Duane Michals has been making photographs which investigate themes of memory, mortality, love. He always finds new ways to understand the human experience through his idiosyncratic combination of philosophy, humor, history, and strong emotion. Currently he is shooting short films that will be shown in the gallery in 2019. In 1970, he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, followed by numerous exhibitions around the world.
Gabriele Croppi (1974) graduated in Photography at Istituto Italiano di Fotografia in Milan. His works focus on the relationship between photography and other arts, such as architecture, film, literature and painting.
For the series New York, Metaphysics of the Urban Landscape, he has created startling black-and-white cityscapes of immense stillness and beauty. The focus of this series is the urban landscape of New York with its world-famous architectural icons. The juxtaposition of light and shadow and the stark contrasts of black and white make his photographs appear like futuristic images. Human beings in the pictures appear like miniatures put into a historical set. Croppi’s photos are impressively beautiful and remind the viewer of De Chirico’s paintings. Croppi captures photographs of this city that stand in contrast to the images of NY that are in our twentieth–century collective memory - images of a vertical New York. The series stands out for its stark form and composition, arranging solitary figures in some of the busiest and most chaotic areas of the city.
Pete Marifoglou (*1954) began photographing in New York when he was only 11 years old. His experimental professor, Jud Yalkut, introduced him to Andy Warhol, who later became an iconic symbol for New York City. Together with Warhol, Marifoglou worked in the famous Factory, where he was present with his camera, chased away the hours, assisted, and was inspired. During this time an iconic Warhol portrait and further photographs of prominent musicians like Lou Reed and Bob Dylan were created.
In the 1970’s, Pete Marifoglou became a student of Duane Michals at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Now, almost 50 years later, teacher and student simultaneously present their perspectives on New York, a city in which they have both lived and worked for so many years.
Marifoglou has figured out in which way the act of photographing influences his own personal life: “I could see people and myself better within a frame’s borders than without. Maybe, unconsciously, I’ve found a way of hiding from myself, by hiding within a frame.” His images often represent empty, abandoned spaces and streets that leave behind emotional traces of solitude and isolation. Objects and places left behind are past metaphoric narratives from unknown persons and moments in life. For him, photographing people’s traces is more powerful than photographing them.