Most of Rut Blees Luxemburg’s pictures are night views of enormous buildings and abandoned urban spaces. The city and civilisation are laid bare in their infrastructures, in their nooks and crannies, as if we were backstage in a theatre. No human figures are to be found here, but this is no icy report on today’s inhumanity, either: on the contrary these images are imbued with some vital force, like fragments of dreams where intensely contrasting sensations—fear and desire, madness and rationality— coalesce in an irresistible personal vision.

David Barriet, David Benassayag, Béatrice Didier

Rut Blees Luxemburg is presenting new images from her Black Sunrise series. Taken in New York in 2010, these big, luminous photos echo Walt Whitman’s poetic panorama of the city and its multitude of desires. The works on show explore the darkest urban recesses. In the title image a black pipe is snaking towards a huge globe of the world: a grandiloquent symbol of empire diminished by a dark sky in which we sense a gleam of light.O offers the ‘come-on’ eye of an American actress, partly overlaid with a low-rent sex-business sticker: here all the appalling profanation of beauty and Eros is made visible in the flutter of an eyelash. The Luxemburg oeuvre has its roots in the city’s public spaces. The artist lays bare the inner workings of today’s ‘modern projects’, yet succeeds in endowing them with an incredible sensuality. Her work is an attempt to show what we pay no attention to, what is not looked at, what we do not expect: and it plunges us into these dizzying compositions that contrast and deconstruct accepted perceptions of the city.