Bettina (1927–2021) was an American artist who lived and worked in New York. She was a resident of the Chelsea Hotel for nearly fifty years, over which she produced a wide-ranging body of work spanning photography, painting, sculpture, film, and textile. The works on view in the exhibition are from her Phenomenological New York series (1972-1986), which included photographs of New York’s skyline reflected in the windows of the city’s towering office buildings, bringing fluidity and movement to the city’s skyscrapers. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Hessel Museum, Annandale-on Hudson (2023) and Les Recontres de la Photographie, Arles (2022); her work has been included in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2023), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2023), MoMA PS1, New York (2021), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021).

Birgit Jürgenssen (1949-2003) was an Austrian artist who lived and worked in Vienna. Her series Interieurs (1997-1998) is a multi-layered depiction of one’s home, engaging the division between inside and outside, and private and public. The source material for the line drawings on which the works are based is an interior design manual from 1976 titled Schöner Wohnen (English: Better Living); across the series, Jürgenssen modified each room’s template by incorporating images (including images of other works of hers) that irritate the sterile domestic backdrop. These collages (made in a notebook; the spiral binding can be seen on the left of some images) were then photographed with shadows cast across their surface, adding yet another uncanny layer to Jürgenssen’s play between the familiar domestic scenes and the underlying secrets hidden in the images below. A retrospective of Jürgenssen’s work was exhibited at the Weserburg Museum of Art, Bremen (2020), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (2019), the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo (2019) and the Kunsthalle Tübingen (2018).

Nina Porter (*1994, UK) lives and works between London and Frankfurt. Recent exhibitions include vision on the run, a. SQUIRE, London; Carriers and Manifestations, Petrine, Paris with Kobby Adi. Recent screenings include The French Institute, London; Mackintosh Lane, London; The Austrian Film Museum, Vienna and The Horse Hospital, London. In 2023 she carried out a research residency in the archive of Fernand Deligny at l’Abbaye d’Ardenne in Northern France.

Carol Rhodes (1959–2018) was a Scottish artist who worked primarily in painting and drawing. Her paintings, depicting fictitious cities, towns, and buildings, often alienate viewers from the landscape by using unique aerial and distant perspectives and a flattened visual hierarchy. Studies of human construction and movement abound; places seemingly familiar become foreign. Rhodes’s work is represented in a number of public collections across the UK, including Tate, London, the Glasgow Museums, Glasgow, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, among many others. In 2024, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, hosted a solo exhibition of Rhodes’s work.

The works of Hanna Stiegeler (*1985, DE) in the exhibition appropriate imagery from the Picture Collection of the New York Public Library. The Picture Collection is comprised of over 1.5 million images clipped from books and magazines from the early twentieth century to the present; it offers access to a diverse array of images, which Stiegeler employs to delve into the world of cityscapes and storefronts. Each of Stiegeler’s works from this series begins with a photograph of the image from the Picture Collection – zoomed in, blurred, cropped, or otherwise recontextualized – which she then screenprints in varying colors, at times overlaid by brushstrokes. Through these images and their modifications, Stiegeler explores not only the unique architectural contours of urban façades and the experiences they dictate, but also the stories told by their original commercial contexts. Stiegeler lives and works in Berlin. She received both a BA and MA from Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig. Stiegeler has been represented by Sweetwater since 2020; her most recent exhibition at the gallery, titled Infinite Library, took place in the summer of 2023.