New York City (close)

This photographic base was shot in New York City.

Printed on Fine Art Hahnemühle Hemp Natural Line 290 g/m2.

Each print comes signed and numbered. 

Unframed. With a small white border. Send in a tube.

Print size 90 x 75 cm - Edition of 10

Print size 60 x 50 cm - Edition of 10.

Print size 30 x 25 cm - Edition of 10.
Print size 10,5 x 14,8 cm (DIN A6) - Edition of 100.

Cities like dreams—and some are told upside down.

Thomas Haensgen’s New York City (close) from the Urban Reflection series is no ordinary urban landscape. It’s an urban hallucination, a place teetering on the edge of logical understanding, only to lose its balance with a playful wink. The New York skyline, razor-sharp yet surreal, doubles in its own reflection—not like a tranquil lake, but like a conversation with an exuberant twin who simply refuses to stop contradicting itself.

The rigid symmetry isn’t just a design trick; it’s an ironic nod to the classical notion of realism. The mirrored skyscrapers echo Escher’s impossible architecture: a city and its copy existing simultaneously, neither above nor below, but in a dimension that forces our eyes to seek anchor points—only to realize there’s no ground, just the reflection.

The twist? This cityscape carries an intimacy born paradoxically out of distance. Like a familiar conversation accidentally played backward, revealing more meaning than expected. Haensgen transforms the frenetic energy of New York into a meditative study, prompting us to ponder urban identities and our own perception of reality—like that moment when you flip a coffee cup to read its underside and wonder if the cup is watching you back.

In the context of other artists, Haensgen’s work finds itself between the urban aspirations of Andreas Gursky and the playful, geometric fantasies of René Magritte. Yet, while Gursky draws the viewer’s gaze outward into vastness and Magritte ambushes them with surreal humor, Haensgen poses a subtler question: What happens when the city that never sleeps suddenly pauses and looks at itself in the mirror?

What makes New York City (close) remarkable is how it fuses clarity and chaos, order and deviation, monumentality and familiarity. It’s a metropolis so precise yet so dreamlike that one might swear it breathes—or at least stretches furtively toward the sky to catch one last glimpse of its other half.