Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes’s “Persistence of Vision”

Peter Hujar’s singular black-and-white photographs invite us to surrender to intense encounters. It scarcely matters whether his subject is the embalmed bodies in Palermo’s Capuchin catacombs or Manhattan’s East Village 1970s artistic scene. Lovers, including Paul Thek and David Wojnarowicz, take their place alongside farmyard animals and Skippy the Boa Constrictor. The image of Candy Darling on Her Death Bed II (1973) is seared into the collective cultural memory.

The quietly engrossing two-person exhibition at Gropius Bau contains 120 of Hujar’s prints, providing a rich cross-section of his oeuvre. These works alone would be reason enough to see the exhibition. Its experimental, intergenerational format, however, pairs Hujar with Liz Deschenes (it is both artists’ first major exhibition in Berlin) to meditate on the nature of photography as a medium, beyond its biographical aspects. It is primarily on this conceptual level that it makes sense to couple Hujar’s once overlooked, now canonized photographs with Deschenes’s non-representational, structuralist photographic sculptures and wall pieces. From the outset, the non-alphabetical listing of the names and the forward slash in the title suggest that this will be a deliberately unconventional pairing.

The rooms form a horseshoe sequence, meaning that viewers must retrace their steps and reencounter works at new angles. I was captivated by this unlikely show, even in the Gropius Bau’s unforgiving, denuded late nineteenth-century spaces. Deschenes’s panel photogram series, including Untitled (1881) (2025), each exposed in moonlight to produce murky, silvery mirrors awash with chemical shadows, are here paired with Hujar’s nightscapes. In another room, two cast-glass poles by Deschenes, both titled Retaining (2025), mounted in fittings and leaning against the wall, are elegant formal companions to Hujar’s images of men hanging out together on the derelict Hudson River piers, suggesting both support and inclination.

Elsewhere, Deschenes’s work deploying patented hi-tech smartphone screen glass, including Untitled (Gorilla Glass Violet 80) (2025), is displayed in front of a window through which fascist-era architecture can be seen. The next room features a series of Hujar’s achingly personal portraits of Paul Thek. Larger forces are implicitly at stake.

To contemporary eyes, Hujar’s images might seem self-evidently potent. The small recognition he achieved in his own lifetime might be attributed in part to the artist’s own tendency, as his friend Fran Lebowitz remarked, to “[hang] up on every important photography dealer in the Western world.”1 In a poetic twist, the qualities that once counted against his acceptance by the art community—his traditional technique, commercial and fashion photography background, and artistic cruising in Manhattan’s demimonde—now anchor his legacy. The involved yet alienated, first-person nature of Hujar’s work resonates today, yet to encounter his work posthumously is, inevitably, to reckon to some extent with death, entropy, fragility and loss, and the arbitrary nature of survival. The works shown here capture the heartbeat of a bohemian generation, many lost to HIV/AIDS, and a gritty Manhattan since erased by gentrification.

Central to the exhibition is the decision to show Hujar’s work in a manner redolent of the artist’s last exhibition before he died in 1987, held the previous year at Gracie Mansion Gallery, New York: framed, mostly square-format images in a grid on two rows, and including examples from different series mixed together. Although the cheap clip frames have been swapped out for neutral white wooden frames (the Frank O’Hara poem that was scrawled around the top of the wall, leftover from a previous show, was also omitted). This is not the first time that Hujar’s work has been exhibited in this way, but here it emphasizes its dialogue with art history and conceptual breadth.

The risk of this staged coupling is that it might seem arbitrary, and the promised dialogue about the medium itself (“light, chemistry and time,” as the institution’s website puts it) be wishful thinking.2 The two artists have highly distinctive approaches to making. Here, however, Hujar’s narratives of radical lives do not overpower Deschenes’s ambient techno-materialism. Meanwhile, Deschenes’s works, such as Untitled (Claude Glass) (2023), inspired by a pocket mirror popularized by eighteenth-century landscape painters, point to the paradoxical insights that can be gained by reducing visual information. Placed next to each other, Hujar looked more analytical and sculptural, and Deschenes more lyrical: both asked viewers to reverberate in their lush grays.