The pandemic has emptied the streets of SoHo, which usually teem with tourists. In his latest cover—a brightly hued riff on Impressionism—Christoph Niemann paints a neighborhood whose old buildings and cobblestone streets seem like a stage waiting for its actors to return. Niemann, who is based in Berlin, recently spoke with us about his work.
Quarantine has prevented you from making your usual trips to New York. What do you miss most about the city?
Walking around, or going for a run around lower Manhattan or Prospect Park. Just being there and breathing the air is something I miss badly.
Your style is wide-ranging, but your interest in abstraction, color, and composition remains constant. If you had been born centuries ago, which painter or artistic school would you have been interested in?
I constantly obsess over different periods in art history. Right now, I’m back to Japanese wood-block printing. I wouldn’t mind one or two drawing classes with Hiroshige.
You work as a designer and illustrator. Do you approach each discipline differently?
Not necessarily, at least in terms of style. The biggest difference is that, with an illustration project, I start at the end: What’s the point I want to make? Then I go back and try to find the most interesting path toward that conclusion. The other approach is to start with a hunch of an idea, and let the process decide where the image goes. Often it goes nowhere, but if things work out I usually end up at a very unexpected place. That’s why the latter approach is ill-suited for commissioned work—but it’s great for New Yorker covers.
