Orhan Pamuk: Orange

Silent Cities presents Mat Hennek’s portraits of some of the world’s great cities—from New York, Los Angeles and London, to Tokyo, Munich and Abu Dhabi—yet all curiously lacking people. Conceived and constructed by man as vessels for human activity, these metropolises are transformed by Hennek into monuments of silence: empty, some-times eerie sites for rituals of work and recreation that are yet to take place. Whether the shimmering windows of a Dallas office building, a lush Hong Kong garden of palms, blooms and fountains, the famed pastel terraced facades of Monaco, or rows of trolleys outside the concrete bulk of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, Hennek’s pictures demonstrate a consistent formal rigor and recast familiar environments as new sources for focus and reflection.

His photographs [...] collect so many elements that they have the power of mandalas, representing the universe in a fragment, and provoking a state of pure contemplation: in the simple experience of gazing, everything becomes pure. Laureline Amanieux

Mat Hennek was born in the Black Forest area of Germany in 1969 and today lives with his partner, the French pianist Hélène Grimaud, in upstate New York and California. While previously based in Berlin, Hennek created influential photographic portraits for the entertainment and music industries, before turning his attention to natural landscapes. He has held solo exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia and the USA. Steidl published Hennek’s Woodlands project in 2017, which he presented with Grimaud as the multimedia concert Woodlands and Beyond... at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, com-bining his photos with her performance of romantic and impressionistic compositions