Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 8

Michael Wolf
Transparent City #11 – Michael Wolf, Chicago, USA, City, Rooftops, Skyscraper

2007

About the Item

Michael WOLF (1954 – 2019, Germany) Transparent City #11, 2007 C–print Sheet 121.9 x 152.4 cm (48 x 60 in.) Frame 127 x 158 cm (50 x 62 1/4 in.) Edition of 9, plus 2 AP; Ed. no. 8/9 Print only – Michael Wolf Michael Wolf was born in 1954 in Munich, Germany. He worked and lived in Paris and Hong Kong where he died in April 2019. The focus of Michael Wolf’s work is life in mega-cities. His projects document both the architecture and the vernacular culture of metropolises. Born in Munich, Wolf grew up in Canada, Europe, and the United States, studying at UC Berkeley and at the Folkwang School with Otto Steinert in Essen, Germany. He moved to Hong Kong in 1994, where he worked for eight years as a contract photographer for Stern magazine. Since 2003, Wolf has been focusing on his own projects, publishing over thirty books of his work. His work is held in many permanent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art in California, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, and M+ in Hong Kong. – Transparent City Chicago, like many urban centers throughout the world, has recently undergone a surge in new construction, grafting a new layer of architectural experimentation onto those of past eras. In early 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, with the support of U.S. Equities Realty, invited Michael Wolf as an artist-in-residence to document this phenomenon. Bringing his unique perspective on changing urban environments to a city renowned for its architectural legacy, Wolf chose to photograph the central downtown area, focusing specifically on issues of voyeurism and the contemporary urban landscape in flux. This was Wolf's first body of work to address an American city. Whereas prior series have juxtaposed humanizing details within the surrounding geometry of the urban landscape, in The Transparent City, his details are fragments of life–digitally distorted and hyper-enlarged–snatched surreptitiously via telephoto lenses. ‘The ground is nowhere in sight in Wolf’s dramatically geometric, nearly abstract photographs of Chicago’s Loop towers. Shot from strategically selected rooftops and perfectly printed in an aptly large, vertical book, Wolf’s subtly modulated color photographs are monumental studies in grays, whites, blacks, golds, and occasional splashes of green and blue. Given their elegant grids, nuanced variations, and stillness, these images echo the minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin, yet this is the real world, and real people inhabit these immense cellular buildings, these boxy hives, these human filing cabinets, and Wolf’s stealthy, intrusive lens finds them, most often alone contemplating a television or computer. The lighting is exquisitely moody, each lit interior is a screen or stage, each human figure as poignant as those in the paintings of Edward Hopper, an artist Wolf, acclaimed for his earlier books on China, cites as an influence. With intimations of surveillance and vulnerability, these intensely beautiful cityscapes seem austere and inhuman until one lands on a magnified picture of a man giving the distant photographer the finger.’ – Donna Seaman – Michael Wolf, Art, City, Street Photography, Colour Photography, Cityscape, Skyscraper, Building, Chicago, USA, Architecture, Geometry, Structure, Abstract, Rooftops, Night
  • Creator:
  • Creation Year:
    2007
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 48 in (121.9 cm)Width: 64.02 in (162.6 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Framing:
    Framing Options Available
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Zurich, CH
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU128017055082

More From This Seller

View All
The scent of her lingers – Brigitte Lustenberger, Flower
By Brigitte Lustenberger
Located in Zurich, CH
Brigitte LUSTENBERGER (*1969, Switzerland) Are you here or just a memory, 2023 From the series 'An Apparition Of Memory' C-print 100 x 116 cm Edition of 5, plus 2 AP; Ed. no. 1/5 pr...
Category

2010s Contemporary Color Photography

Materials

C Print

Guinevere in Jorya – Erik Madigan Heck, Fashion, Color, Photography, Woman
By Erik Madigan Heck
Located in Zurich, CH
Erik MADIGAN HECK (*1983, United States) Guinevere in Jorya, 2016 Chromogenic print Sheet 114.3 x 76.2 cm (45 x 30 in.) Frame 116.5 x 78.5 x 4 cm (45 7/8 x 30 7/8 x 1 5/8 in.) Editio...
Category

2010s Contemporary Color Photography

Materials

C Print

Monkey Comic Book
By Albert Watson
Located in Zurich, CH
Albert WATSON (*1942, Scotland) Monkey Comic Book, 1992 Chromogenic print from a polaroid positive face mounted to acrylic (Diasec) 243 x 183 cm (95 5/8 x 72 in.) Edition of 3, plus 1 AP; Ed. no. 1/3 Print only Signed by the artist Albert Watson (*1942, Scotland) is a Scottish photographer well known for his fashion, celebrity, and art photography, having shot over 200 Vogue and 40 Rolling Stone covers since the mid-1970s. His photographs are signature, classical, and bold, and in our world of manipulation, Watson prefers the enlargers and the trays; an artist who greatly enriches our perception with his unique photographic view. Photo District News named Watson one of the 20 most influential photographers of all time, along with Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, among others. The work ‘Kate Moss...
Category

1990s Contemporary Color Photography

Materials

C Print, Polaroid

Les Nouveaux Constructeurs, Sète – Port n°4 – Stéphane Couturier, Architecture
By Stéphane Couturier
Located in Zurich, CH
Stéphane COUTURIER (*1957, France) Les Nouveaux Constructeurs, Sète – Port n°4, 2018 Cibachrome, framed to artist's specification 69 x 52 cm (27 1/8 x 20 1/2 in.) Edition of 4; Ed. no. 2/4 Framed Born in 1957 in Neuilly sur Seine, Stéphane Couturier currently lives and works in Paris. In 1994, Stéphane Couturier showed his first works in a series called 'Urban Archaeology', viewing the city as a living organism with multiple aspects. He photographed it deliberately avoiding anything that suggested poetry, nostalgia or strangeness. From 1999 on, Stéphane Couturier was increasingly drawn to suburbs and began to focus on a different type of landscape: on the one hand, by tackling housing blocks and high-rises in his 'Monuments' series; on the other, by photographing mushrooming housing developments.These generic cities soon became his favorite subject. – Les Nouveaux Constructeurs At the invitation of Julie Gutierrez, curator of the Musée Fernand Léger in Biot (France), Stéphane Couturier intensively studied the work of Fernand Léger, one of the Master of Modern painting in France in the early 20th century. Léger paid particular attention to the upheavals of his time. Alongside the city, the transformation of man through machine and mass production was the central theme of his works, which, starting from the formal experiments of the Cubists, found their own artistic expression, combining Cubist avant-garde with Communist commitment. ‘I have become aware of the many elements that bring me closer to him - his fascination for the city, for industrial elements, for architecture, for the geometry of forms...’, comments Stéphane Couturier on his examination of Léger's work. When photographs of cityscapes and industrial architecture are combined with the painter's compositions, the principle of superimposing two images, which the photographer has developed into an essential element of his art in recent years, is taken to a new level. The encounter of two different and yet closely related, because architectural structures, leads to works that are both painterly photographs and photographic paintings. Constructively and constructively, these works depict the reality as seen, yet go beyond the merely visible. Not images, but pictures that have their own reality. Photographed as cibachromes and fitted into a black object...
Category

2010s Contemporary Color Photography

Materials

C Print

Double Exposure through Windshield – Albert Watson, Green, Landscape, Nature
By Albert Watson
Located in Zurich, CH
ALBERT WATSON (*1942, Scotland) Double Exposure through Windshield 2013 C-print Sheet 243 x 183 cm (95 5/8 x 72 in.) Edition of 3, plus 1 AP; Ed. no. 1/3 Framed A student of the fam...
Category

2010s Contemporary Landscape Photography

Materials

C Print

Alger – Bab El Oued – Melting Point n°11 – Stéphane Couturier, Architecture, Art
By Stéphane Couturier
Located in Zurich, CH
Stéphane COUTURIER (*1957, France) Alger – Bab El Oued – Melting Point n°11, 2017 C-print in Artist's frame 50 x 39 cm (19 5/8 x 15 3/8 in.) Edition of 8; Ed. no. 2/8 Framed Born in 1957 in Neuilly sur Seine, Stéphane Couturier currently lives and works in Paris. In 1994, Stéphane Couturier showed his first works in a series called 'Urban Archaeology', viewing the city as a living organism with multiple aspects. He photographed it deliberately avoiding anything that suggested poetry, nostalgia or strangeness. From 1999 on, Stéphane Couturier was increasingly drawn to suburbs and began to focus on a different type of landscape: on the one hand, by tackling housing blocks and high-rises in his 'Monuments' series; on the other, by photographing mushrooming housing developments.These generic cities soon became his favorite subject. – Alger In his latest series, which was created over a period of more than three years, Stéphane Couturier explores, in highly aesthetic and, at the same time, socially ambitious photos and videos, the ‘Climat de France’ housing project – today called Oued Koriche – in Algiers. Built in the International Style in the 1950s and based on a design by French architect Fernand Pouillon...
Category

2010s Contemporary Color Photography

Materials

C Print

You May Also Like

The First Cut by Robyn Stacey, 2009, C-Print
By Robyn Stacey
Located in Dallas, TX
The First Cut by Robyn Stacey features a large watermelon sitting on a wooden table in this dramatically lit still-life. The handle of a silver knife protrudes out from a cut in the ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Color Photography

Materials

C Print

Poor Richard Head, Salton Sea, California - Roadside America Color Photo
By Richard Heeps
Located in Cambridge, GB
A classic American icon, the roadside giant "Muffler Man", captured on Richard Heeps' road trip between Mecca and the Salton Sea. Part of a series of pictures by Richard Heeps featur...
Category

Early 2000s Contemporary Color Photography

Materials

Photographic Paper, C Print, Color, Silver Gelatin

Large Maxx Hermann C-Print, Signed Limited Edition
Located in Lake Worth Beach, FL
Artist/Designer; Manufacturer: Maxx Hermann (b. 1955) Marking(s); notes: signed; ed. 3/ 5; 2004 Country of origin; materials: German; C-print Dimensions...
Category

Early 2000s Contemporary Color Photography

Materials

C Print

Large Maxx Hermann C-Print, Signed Limited Edition, 59"W
Located in Lake Worth Beach, FL
Artist/Designer; Manufacturer: Maxx Hermann (b. 1955) Marking(s); notes: signed; ed. 1/ 5; 2007 Country of origin; materials: German; C-print Dimensions...
Category

Early 2000s Contemporary Color Photography

Materials

C Print

Large Maxx Hermann C-Print, 59"W
Located in Lake Worth Beach, FL
Artist/Designer; Manufacturer: Maxx Hermann (b. 1955) Marking(s); notes: signed; ed. 1/ 5; 2007 Country of origin; materials: German; C-print Dimensions...
Category

Early 2000s Contemporary Color Photography

Materials

C Print

Afar II by Luca Marziale - Contemporary fine art photography, landscape, diptych
By Luca Marziale
Located in Paris, FR
Afar II is a limited-edition diptych photograph by contemporary artist Luca Marziale. This photograph is sold unframed as a print only. It is available in 2 sizes: *76.2 cm × 152.4...
Category

2010s Contemporary Landscape Photography

Materials

C Print

Recently Viewed

View All