Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf’s solo exhibition here—the first since his death this past April—is a sampling from this prolific photographer’s oeuvre. Wolf, who was born in Germany but spent much of his life in China, inflected his pictures with the grandness of nineteenth-century European landscape painting while maintaining a hyperrealistic clarity synonymous with contemporary German photography. What initially come across as austere depictions of bleak modernist architecture and urban existence often break down into frank and, at various times, jarring moments of intimacy.

Two photo series by Wolf, “Transparent City,” 2007, and “Architecture of Density,” 2003–2008—made in Chicago and Hong Kong, respectively—offer up a variety of office buildings and apartment complexes, some of which were shot from neighboring parking garages. Many a Hopperesque vignette can be viewed through their windows: of workers on conference calls, for example, or seemingly lived-in rooms devoid of people. Manhattan Street View #2, 2010, a work that appropriates similar kinds of vistas from Google Street View, details a pinkish structure foregrounded by the denuded branches of a tree. And Paris Rooftops #17, 2014, depicts the City of Light fractured like a Cubist painting. Both works seem to configure the metropolitan landscape as a site of surveillance and abstraction.

Also on display are a dozen portraits from the artist’s series “Tokyo Compression,” 2010, which features commuters aboard steamy and crammed subway cars. Wolf captures faces—expressionless, solemn, or lost in some private reverie—through windows thick with condensation. These pictures, awkward, tender, and often funny, inject a familiar warmth into our pallid existence.