by Jesse Slater // Apr. 17, 2026
The skeletons of collapsing buildings; shifting licks of light on water; insubmissive deathbed portraiture. Wandering through ‘Persistence of Vision’ at Gropius Bau, I feel fizzy. Peter Hujar’s photography, mostly taken in 1970s and 80s New York, is occupied with the intensity of impermanence. It seeks out a startling kind of liveliness, the sort that comes when subjects are at their most mutable. Presented alongside Hujar’s photographs, contemporary works by New York-based artist Liz Deschenes physically extend this sense of liveliness into the exhibition space. Through dewy reflections and distortions of light, Deschenes’ pieces return my attention to myself, and to the fleeting, spangling moment as it passes.
Peter Hujar: ‘Hudson River (III),’ 1976 // © The Peter Hujar Archive / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026
I smile as the first Hujar photographs I see are of people loitering around the Piers, an abandoned dockland along the Hudson River that became a meeting place for queer people, artists and unhoused people in the 1970s and 80s. Someone lies back on a bench in tattered denim shorts, one ankle slung over the opposite knee, legs framing their sun-drenched face. A kid grins up at the camera, body splayed across a ship’s ropes. A group of guys loll against each other, somebody’s head resting on another’s bulging crotch. The piers were a cruising spot, and a sexual charge runs through some of the images. A sense of ease carries across them all.
In the next room, attention shifts to the piers’ architecture. In ‘Canal Street Pier (Four Doors),’ Hujar photographs the derelict interiors of the structures: paint peeling from walls punctured with holes, fragments of the building scattered across warped floorboards, doorframes outlining the bleached-out voids of empty rooms. Presented beside it, ‘Canal Street Pier (Suitcase)’ feels like an inverse: a compacted cuboid of trash lying out in the sun. Unlike Hujar’s portraits of the Piers’ visitors, decay is centered here. But there’s also a stubborn thrill of possibility; the chance to squat and make use of the privacy of the ruin.
Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes: ‘Persistence of Vision,’ 2026, installation view at Gropius Bau // © Gropius Bau, photo by Luca Girardini
The first Deschenes work I encounter is in this room too: milky cast glass poles leaning against the gallery wall, fixed to the floorboards with metal hinges. ‘Retaining’ reads as industrial, inspired by scaffold structures that hold up unstable historical buildings. The glass seems to glower from within, like a run-down tube light. It occurs to me that if the wall were to give way somehow—bowing like the derelict buildings in the photographs around me—the poles would shift on their hinges, eventually teetering over to smash on the ground.
Glass is Deschenes’ chosen material for a number of works, including her ‘Untitled (Claude Glass)’ pieces. Cast as dappled black rectangles, they produce warped reflections of the room; drained of color, with shapes billowing like on the surface of water. The works reference optical devices used by landscape painters from the 17th century onwards to simplify tonal range. Deschenes’ works shift my perception of myself. I walk forwards and backwards, my reflection splaying out then hollowing across its surface. Hujar’s images of the Hudson and East River are presented on the adjacent wall. Each holds varying measures of jet-black depths, undulating midtones and flashes of extreme white highlights at the water’s edge. The room feels contemplative, a pause from the demand of portraiture, of relating to others.
Peter Hujar: ‘David Wojnarowicz (Hand Touching Eye),’ 1981 // © The Peter Hujar Archive / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026
Deschenes’ photogram works, made by exposing black-and-white photographic paper to nocturnal light, also double as mirrors. Their aluminum surfaces produce a dewy, sepia-inflected glow. In front of these works, I take my chance to look at other people wandering around the exhibition instead. Photographs Hujar took at night stand across the room; my favourite is ‘Parking Lots, West Side, New York.’ An expanse of car parks stolen from the relief of the skyscrapers that surround them opens out. Debris gathers along chain-link fences, drawn by the wind across the empty lot with nothing else to catch it. The slung-back saloon cars look seedy, as if loitering just out of sight. An advertisement for ‘LEATHER’ on a far building reads like an invitation. Even Hujar’s inanimate subjects are lively and enticing.
Peter Hujar: ‘Self-Portrait (I) Jumping,’ 1974 // © The Peter Hujar Archive / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026
Portraiture also features heavily in the exhibition. It opens with a needlessly blingy, blown-up video portrait of Hujar by Andy Warhol, loosely positioning Hujar within the East Village scene. Hujar’s own images of friends and fellow artists are softer, and far more compelling. Cookie Mueller reclines, light catching in one eye. David Wojnarowicz looks directly down the lens, mouth parted. Sheryl Sutton balances her weight on one leg. William Burroughs rests his head in his palm. Hujar’s self-portraits vary between being lovably goofy and energetically wrought—shoulders slunk down at the back of a room, the floor stamped with footprints. There’s something disobedient about them.
Peter Hujar: ‘Candy Darling on Her Deathbed,’ 1973 // © The Peter Hujar Archive / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026
Seeing Hujar’s early images of bodies at rest in Palermo’s catacombs (1963), it clicks: many of his reclining portraits seem to anticipate death, assume its shape, while remaining direct and obstinate. He even photographed Candy Darling from her white-sheeted death bed, sultry eyes fixed on the lens. The sad fact lingers that some of those pictured died young of AIDS, including Hujar himself in 1987.
Liz Deschenes: ‘Untitled (Gorilla Glass Red 100),’ 2024 // © Courtesy of Liz Deschenes and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, photo by Stephen Faught
As I’m rounding out the exhibition, it’s one of Deschenes’ pieces that leaves me with my lasting impression. Hung in front of the gallery’s only unobscured window, ‘Gorilla Glass’ is made of six squares of frosted glass in indigo, yellow, orange, violet and two pieces in black. It breaks the monochromatic scene of the exhibition. On this March day, the sky holds a constant blue, changed from the grey it was when I entered Gropius Bau a couple of hours before. I look at the glass, at the sky, just long enough to feel it shifting.
Exhibition Info
Gropius Bau
Peter Hujar and Liz Deschenes: ‘Persistence of Vision’
Exhibition: Mar. 19-June 28, 2026
berlinerfestspiele.de
Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, click here for map
