The exhibition “THE URBAN SKIN” by artists Pietro Ruffo, Jan Bauer, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi is on view at the URBAN NATION Project Space and focuses on the city of Rome as a dense space of images and memories.
Image gallery
Pietro Ruffo: Antropocene 88 (2024)
The exhibition features drawings by Pietro Ruffo and Jan Bauer, created using a variety of artistic media:
as multi-layered compositions, paper cuts, cartographic structures, precise observations, and material-based studies.
Both artists approach Rome as a city whose surfaces bear traces of time, power, memory, destruction, and renewal.
The city thus appears not merely as a motif, but as a vulnerable body and an open archive.
Rome forms the historical and conceptual center of the exhibition.
In the works of Pietro Ruffo and Jan Bauer, the city reveals itself as a site of millennia-old stratifications:
ruins, facades, fragments, monuments, and architectural details point to a complex interweaving of history, nature, political imagination, and cultural memory.
In the exhibition, urban surfaces are not understood as a static backdrop, but as carriers of traces and meanings that reveal how history continues to shape the present.
In his works, Pietro Ruffo draws on historical models by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. His precise drawings, paper cuts, and multi-layered cartographies connect these geographical and architectural systems with cosmic and geological time scales, thereby placing architecture within a global, historical perspective.
Jan Bauer, on the other hand, focuses on microscopic detail.
His paintings and drawings concentrate on damaged surfaces and fragments in urban space. His works reveal what remains legible of urban memory when buildings and visual records are altered by time and destruction or removed from their original context.
The exhibition is complemented by an interactive resonance lab, where the ideas drawn from the artists’ works are applied to Berlin.
There, visitors encounter questions about Berlin’s surfaces, traces, and memories.
As a special historical foundation, five original etchings by Piranesi will be on display there.
Alongside selected books and materials from the collection of URBAN NATION’s Martha Cooper Library, they serve as a source of inspiration for visitors’ own reflection, reading, writing, and drawing.
Visitors are invited to engage with questions about Berlin:
Which surface tells a story?
Which trace should remain visible?
Which wall bears witness to change?
Answers can be expressed in writing, through drawings, or as sketches and will be incorporated into a growing archive of responses.
In addition, the workshop “Colourful Faces of Antiquity” with Jan Bauer offers young people the opportunity to create portraits at the intersection of ancient sculpture and urban stencil design.
THE URBAN SKIN views Berlin not as a backdrop, but as a living, constantly evolving body whose cracks reveal the city’s present.
Berlin is not understood here as a mere exhibition space, but as an urban body whose surfaces preserve history while simultaneously taking on new meanings all the time.
