Sister cities in America’s Midwest, both historically and culturally, Chicago and Detroit are suddenly swapping artists:

Detroit is famous for its music, but remains perfectly unknown for its art. Yet, the city itself rages with underground galleries and guerilla projects. All of which tags Detroit as the last frontier for contemporary art. Changing Cities is the first step in establishing a global awareness plan, a project that swaps Detroit artists with artists from other cities.

Stig Eklund

Hartmut Austen

Hartmut Austen was born and raised in Germany. During the Nineties, he studied painting and drawing at Hochschule der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin. His paintings and drawings and prints have been included in exhibitions in Bielefeld, Berlin, Chicago, Detroit, New York and Toronto, among other places. He is a member of the artist collective “Telegraph”.

Austen currently works as an instructor in the graduate program at Maine College of Art and Design as well at the College for Creative Studies and Wayne State University in Detroit. Together with Lynn Crawford, he edited the second issue of “Detroit:”, a literary and visual arts journal for Detroit.

Silke Ramelow wrote: “Hartmut Austen’s aesthetic relies in no way upon expressing his subjective perception. Much more, he seeks the points of tangency between his personal external and internal imagery in his paintings, which act beyond the discourse. He refers again and again to the readability of the material he bases the paintings on, but negates the material in the same moment. (...) It appears that only where the painting avoids language, can it develop its own reality.”

Stig Eklund was born in Bergen, Norway in 1976. He has lived and worked in Detroit since 2004.

An undiagnosed dyslexic, Eklund abandoned Secondary education at the age of sixteen. He spent his remaining teen years working at a cardboard factory in his home town. During that time, utilizing the materials at hand, he began to make and experiment with several pinhole cameras. The work from these rudimentary cameras developed into dark, moody photographs. He has since remarked that he can only see "right" through a camera lens.

For extra money, the young photographer soon began to hawk these photos to tourists from ships that docked in Bergen. One of these tourists turned out to be the owner of a major gallery in Detroit. She signed the young Eklund to her artists’ stable and the rest is history.

Eklund’s mature camera style is so strong that it can even shroud a street lamp, so that, instead of light, it seemingly emits darkness and shadows. His vision drapes geometrically clashing urban beauty with the sooty persona of its denizens, succinctly captured by a Norwegian artist who spends much of the year in the glowering twilight of Detroit.