David Hartt: Negative Space

David Hartt’s photographs, videos, sculptures, and installations offer a sensitive and concise portrait of our post-industrial, post-communist, late-capitalist societies. The artist creates work that unpacks the social, cultural, and economic complexities of his various subjects. For Hartt, “place” is a way to investigate community, narrative, ideologies, and the intersection of private and public life.

In his first exhibition at Galerie Thomas Schulte David Hartt will present a new photographic series alongside a new film, whose genesis began with Robert Rauschenberg’s influential journey along the East Coast of the United States in the autumn of 1980, which was documented in a series of photographs. Hartt went on a similar journey from Boston to Atlanta and captured the territory covered using a drone camera, photographs and field recordings.

In his new video The Last Poet Hartt focuses on urban and exurban areas that distinguish themselves through their ubiquity rather than regional specificity and presents to us the so-called Northeast megalopolis as a landscape defined by the reversal of urban to suburban migration patterns, an extreme concentration and stratification of wealth and power on the one hand and the marginalization and displacement of industry and the emergent precarity of environmental catastrophe on the other.

Hartt’s often poetic end time imagery of urban sprawl is complemented with the sober and rational commentary by political scientist and author of The End of History, Francis Fukuyama about current political and socio economic developments in the industrialized nations of the West.

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