Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 5

Born 1984 in New York, NY
Lives in New York, NY

Oto Gillen’s New York is at once familiar and strange, mundane and futuristic. A lifelong New Yorker, he spent more than a year walking the city’s streets to create the images on view in the 2017 Biennial. The gradual rise of a tower at the World Trade Center complex and changing seasons mark the passage of time in his ever-shifting portrait of the city. Views of passersby and close-ups of objects record the intimate, fleeting encounters of daily life at street level, while images of looming skyscrapers convey the city’s vast scale and evolving skyline. Gillen’s photographs capture individual residents but also allude to the larger economic, political, and social forces that entangle them.