Mat Hennek

In the atmospheric photographs of Sounds of Spheres, New York– and California-based Mat Hennek (born 1969) creates striking impressions of how we imaginatively engage with nature. Whether depicting the world from a traditional receding perspective (a misty landscape at sunrise, snow-laden branches, palm trees bending in the wind) or from above (the serpentine curves of a river, fossil-like patterns in sand, the churning surface of the ocean), Hennek does not record nature but captures the apparitions it evokes. Through the soft blurring of edges, lyrical color and a focus on pattern, his images move between representation and abstraction, simultaneously capturing and veiling form. The idea of the sphere links subjects that may at first seem unrelated: the glowing ball of the setting sun, the round shapes of ice crystals in a miniature frozen universe, the great globe of the earth upon which all this unfolds.

In Silent Cities, German photographer Mat Hennek (born 1969) presents portraits of some of the world's great cities—from New York, Los Angeles and London, to Tokyo, Munich and Abu Dhabi—yet all curiously lacking people.

Conceived and constructed by man as vessels for human activity, these metropolises are transformed by Hennek into monuments of silence: empty, sometimes eerie sites for rituals of work and recreation that are yet to take place.

Whether the shimmering windows of a Dallas office building, a lush Hong Kong garden of palms, blooms and fountains, the famed pastel terraced facades of Monaco or rows of trolleys outside the concrete bulk of Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, Hennek's pictures demonstrate a consistent formal rigor and recast familiar environments as new sources for focus and reflection.