Erin O’Keef – City Life

Comunicato stampa

Ncontemporary is glad to present City Life, the first solo show of Erin O'Keefe in Venice. The exhibition includes a selection of new works produced in 2026, a project born from the encounter between two cities at opposite poles, New York and Venice, and from the way both redefine our relationship with space. The show does not depict a specific city, but the city as a mental construction. A place where memory, perception, and desire coexist, and where every image opens a space of uncertainty rather than providing an answer.

If New York represents the starting point of this reflection, Venice is its ideal counterpoint. The artist describes how the rhythm of the lagoon, the silence broken by water, the absence of traffic, the dilated pace of walking, have changed the way she observes. Venice heightens the awareness of space precisely because it seems to constantly oscillate between a real city and a theatrical construction. It’s a place that exists as physical experience but also as an image sedimented in collective memory. This condition resonates deeply with O’Keefe’s method. Her compositions are, in essence, stage sets built to be photographed: maquettes that exist only in the instant they are frozen by the lens. The Venetian city thus becomes not a subject to be represented, but a key to reading her entire visual vocabulary.

Erin O'Keefe (b. 1962, US) is a photographer based in New York City and New Brunswick, Canada. The artist's work is informed by both photography and architecture. The questions asked through the work are about the nature of spatial perception, and the tools used are rooted in the abstract, formal language of making developed as an architect. The artist's latest solo show was held at Seventeen in London in 2025; her works were also included in exhibitions at Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle (2026), Torino Foto Festival (2024), Deutsche Bank Collection X Frieze New York (2022), Palais Populaire Berlin (2021), Kasmin Gallery New York (2020) and The Photographers' Gallery London (2016).