Sidelong Glances

Europe - A Look Back - A Look Ahead

Rainer Maria Schopp

Neither the ‘end of history’ nor the triumph of liberalism. Nowhere. In Europe of the 1980s and 1990s, Rainer Maria Schopp photographed orphaned cities, forgotten villages, and the stories of people who keep falling through the cracks of history. From Berlin to London, Amsterdam to Prague, in Sweden as well as in Austria, he recorded out-of-the-way spots and hideaways that were connected by an unsettling similarity.

Munch's Scream as London graffiti; a nun at the gates of Sanssouci Palace Park: donation can in hand, she gazes grimly at a dead deer. The word ‘Shoemaker’ is written in large letters across an old building’s dilapidated facade. In front of it, a man with an amputated leg makes his way on crutches through the deserted street.

The exhibition focuses on series in which the photographer, who was born in West Berlin in 1950, takes a satirical, sometimes sarcastic look at the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. Schopp’s images are a far cry from the frenzy of Reunification; indeed, they seem like a bitter foreboding of a future that has meanwhile become our present.