Deutsches Haus at NYU presents “The Towers of Babel,” an exhibition of works by Hans Weiss. Please join us for the exhibition opening on April 1 at 6:00pm.
About the exhibition:
The Tower of Babel was the first skyscraper and a symbol of arrogance. God punished the builders for their presumptuousness. The skyscrapers of New York City symbolize the opposite of the biblical Tower of Babel: People from all over the world come to this place and feel free and united and at home. Although they speak 170 different languages, they understand each other.
The photos of this series were shot from a similar perspective as Pieter Bruegel the Elder used 1563 in his famous painting “Tower of Babel”: The bird’s-eye view. All pictures were taken with an iPhone from the 10th floor of NYU’s Bobst Library, from the same spot, between 2014 and 2018, at different times of day and during different seasons. There was always the same view, but every single image of the 3000 pictures is as different as the people in New York City.
For the exhibition, I have categorized the selected 23 photographs under five different themes: Emotions, Seasons, Daytimes, Clouds, and Values.
About the artist:
Hans Weiss is a photographer and writer, living in Vienna/Europe and New York. He received his photographic education at the International Center of Photography in New York in 1994/95 and at the School for Art Photography in Vienna in 1997 and 2010, where he enrolled in workshops with Wolfgang Tillmans and various other renowned photographers. Since 2015, he is a member of the Soho Photo Gallery NY Coop.
His photographic work has been exhibited in Venice (Palazzo Zenobio, Ikona Gallery), New York (Soho Photo Gallery; Deutsches Haus at NYU), Vienna (Photo Gallery), Salzburg (Museum of Modern Art; Rupertinum), Leipzig (Book Fair) and Berlin (Literaturkeller). His photographic work has been mentioned in several professional journals, for instance in “Camera Austria” and “artmagazine.“
Hans Weiss’ fiction and nonfiction books sold more than five million copies and are translated into 20 languages.