Urban Culture, Amsterdam – Düsseldorf – Milan The Street & Modern Life, Birmingham, U.K.

Since the beginning of the 1970s Dutch artist Hans Eijkelboom (*1949) has been addressing the question to what extent the individual is a product of the culture in which they live, and how new technologies, forms of work and means of communication impact on the further development of such a culture.

For his new series Urban Culture, Eijkelboom has shot photographs in the three European metropolises of Milan, Amsterdam and Dusseldorf. The prints, hung in three rows, generate their own complex narrative structure that progresses from image to image, producing striking interrelations. This enables a reading of the inhabitants’ individual histories and cultural influences, whilst an astonishing homogeneity with regard to fashion and habits also becomes evident.

In his work The Street & Modern Life, Eijkelboom meticulously parses the human need to individually differentiate themselves on the basis of the outward appearance, via butterflies and stripes; bags and skulls; Marilyns, Madonnas and Mickey Mouses; tattoos and an A-Z of trademarks. The latter, in particular, play an increasingly significant role in individual assertions of the self in public spaces – which today is particularly apparent in a staging of the self on web-based social media.

Both of the photographic series will be shown on the second floor of a former furniture store in the centre of Essen, in the immediate vicinity of a busy shopping street, which could equally serve as a stage for Eijkelboom’s photographs, as well providing an opportunity for visitors sensitised by the exhibition to make their own subsequent comparisons.

The Street & Modern Life, Birmingham, U.K. (2014) was initiated by Multistory, West-Bromwich, U.K..