City Within
Paul Hutchinson
co-curated with Shem Jacobs
THE BLANC
15 East 40th Street, New York
November 7 - December 6, 2025
City Within is the first solo exhibition in the US by Berlin-based artist Paul Hutchinson, curated by Shem Jacobs and Leo Yuan.
Spanning a decade of photographs, writings, and moving-image works, City Within explores the delicate terrain between external realities and inner life—the ways in which the city imprints itself upon us, and how we, in turn, shape its emotional architecture. Known for his attentive, empathetic gaze, Hutchinson moves between urban spaces and psychological states, capturing the pulse of contemporary existence through fragments of the everyday.
Rooted in his experience growing up in the northern part of Berlin’s Schöneberg district, Hutchinson’s images dwell on the overlooked: worn sneakers, scuffed walls, shifting light, traces of touch and movement. These fragments—both tender and raw—form a sensory cartography of city life, revealing how class, belonging, and aspiration manifest in the surfaces and atmospheres that surround us.
Paul Hutchinson, affection, 2021. Inkjet print. © Paul Hutchinson.
Presented alongside the photographic works are excerpts from Hutchinson’s writing, including his cycle 21 Poems (2023), a body of text pieces that distills his language practice into its most lyrical and direct form. Written in his distinctive, vernacular voice, these short poems hover between confession and observation, humor and fragility. They echo the tone of his photographs while expanding their register—transforming language into image, rhythm into feeling. Hutchinson’s interest in language also carries over into his Word Pieces—an ongoing series of silkscreen prints that physically merge his writing with his visual work, collapsing text and image into a single surface.
Paul Hutchinson, 21 Poems, 2023;
Home, Sunlit , 2021. Inkjet print. © Paul Hutchinson.
A projected moving-image work further extends this sensibility into time and motion. Composed of fleeting gestures and ambient scenes, the film translates Hutchinson’s still gaze into duration, mirroring the flow of the city—the way beauty, erosion, and restlessness coexist in constant negotiation.
Across these interwoven media, Hutchinson constructs what he calls an urban poetics: a language of empathy and endurance that arises from the margins of daily life. His works resist spectacle and hierarchy, privileging small acts of attention over grand gestures. Within the dialogue between photograph, literature, and moving image, Hutchinson reveals the city as both external structure and inner state—a place built as much from consciousness as from form.
Paul Hutchinson, Bagatelle, 2019. C print. © Paul Hutchinson.
Paul Hutchinson, how long it took to find my words have you ever been heard, 2022. Silkscreen. © Paul Hutchinson.
City Within invites viewers to move between surfaces and sensations, between the visible and the felt. It is a meditation on how we inhabit our environments and each other—how, even amid the noise and pressure
of the urban world, moments of stillness, tenderness, and quiet resistance persist.
*text by Shem Jacobs
Paul Hutchinson, Schmetterlinge, Nongfu Spring, 2016. C print. © Paul Hutchinson.
