Murray Guy is very pleased to announce our fourth solo exhibition with Beat Streuli. This show will include photographs and video shot through the urban spaces of New York City, pairing works from two moments of economic turmoil, 1991 and 2009.   What emerges is a portrait of people, surfaces, movements, and gestures—a rich screen on which to read the changes wrought on the city over the past two decades.

Beat Streuli photographs in urban spaces using a telephoto lens that captures people, automobiles, buildings, and the urban fabric with astonishing intimacy.  The black and white works from 1991 dwell on open spaces and on isolated figures—the flâneurs of the contemporary metropolis.  Although they remain anonymous, equal under the lens of the camera, a sense of individual lives and diversity emerges. We as viewers are implicated through the shared experience of negotiating public space, the natural state of watching and being scrutinized, of moving and paying attention.

In Streuli’s recent work— post-Giuliani, 9/11, Bloomberg, the advent of the cell phone, the financial bubble, to name but a few changes over the past two decades—the focus shifts to the hard materials of the city.  A new two-screen projection shows a metallic grille, the edge of a billboard, the bumper of a truck, a plastic security barrier, and many automobiles, whose windows and body panels obscure the figures inside them.  In contrast to the works from two decades earlier, these close-up images seem at times almost aggressively claustrophobic; as Katerina Gregos observes, it is “the surface rather than the subject that takes precedence here. . . as both mirror and screen.”

Beat Streuli was born in 1957 in Switzerland and lives and works in Brussels. His photographs, videos and window installations have been exhibited in galleries and museum all over the world.  Recent solo exhibitions include BALTIC, Gateshead, UK; Musée des Arts Contemporains, Grand-Hornu, Belgium; Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig; and the Museum Folkswang, Essen.  Permanent installations of his work include those at the Lufthansa Aviation Center, Frankfurt Airport, Germany; the ETH University and the Triemli Hospital Zurich, Switzerland; the Style Company Building, Osaka, Japan; and the immigration hall of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, Texas.