Enlarge image north-east-south-west-collage (© Joergen Geerds) The German Consulate General Supports:

New York is a quilt of insides, outsides, and weird quasi-interiors-subway stations, train cars, the High Line, botanical gardens, zoos, and rows of soaring light-sealed or half-finished towers, ascending into the darkly empty sky. These strange spaces trade the warmth of the inside for the mobility of the outside, or vice versa. Their moral: The inside protects us. The outside changes us. We exist (always) somewhere in between.

Joergen Geerds is an artist who sees- in panoramic format- the world’s premier quilt-city in terms of an unending series of bridges, stitching inside into out.

Geerds does not reduce a living, human city to an inhuman cage of steel- a figure associated with futurity and a particularly modern experience desolation. Instead, he shows us a warm emptiness- an outside that has the quality of an in, an outside peeking in to various private realms. In this way, Geerds tricks us into seeing our own world again: For the first time, New York City is itself, free of people but touched by them, touching them; shaped by them, shaping them.

Joergen Geerds was born in Oberstreu, Germany, in 1969. He studied photography and design under Ernst Weckert and Nicolai Sarafov at the University for Applied Science, Würzburg. Since 2000 he has resided in in Astoria, New York. Inspired by the grandeur and grime of New York City, Geerds branched into panoramic photography in 2006 after a successful career as an art director in the advertising world.

Over the years, Geerds has continually refined his love of wide-angle photography. Finding the uncropped cityscapes revealed by his flattened photographs to be unique in the market, Geerds was led to develop his own distinct style—large-scale, hyper-wide night panoramas of New York City.

Since 2008, Geerds has been represented by 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in Chelsea. His solo show “The Other Side”, a panoramic journey to the other side of NYC, runs from January 26 through February 25, 2012 at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel.

Location and time:
German Consulate General
871 United Nations Plaza (49th Street and 1st Avenue), New York  

Free Admission. RSVP required for exhibition opening on January 30, 2012 at 6 p.m.
Please send an email to: germanconsulatenyc[at]gmail.com 

The exhibition will be on view from January 30, 2012 through February 21, 2012,
during regular office hours (Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.)
excluding February 20, 2012.