It is night. A man holding a cigarette in his hand leans on a wrought-iron railing and gazes out at us calmly from the darkness. The urban setting glows red in one of the lenses of his round glasses as he looks directly at us from the other. To his right, a woman with red hair enters the picture. Lightly dressed in a top and shorts, she appears like a figure of light, emerging from the nocturnal city and while at the same time being enveloped by its structures. The illuminated signs, skyscrapers, fragments of a bridge, railroad tracks, and lanes of a highway on which yellow-lit vehicles rush by in various directions form a labyrinthine structure reminiscent of the buildings in Fritz Lang’s expressionist silent film classic Metropolis. 

The image is composed of numerous set pieces that stand for a globalized world, whose conventional principles of order—urban structures, gender constructs, and ethnicities—have become seriously disturbed. The color space also explodes around the pure primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. The effect of this luminous deep space is based on Ruth Baumgarte’s accomplished watercolor technique, which had gained steadily in luminosity and depth since the 1980s through mixed forms of gouache, pastel, charcoal, and pencil.

Due to the ambiguous spatial situation, the artist ultimately left open whether we are looking at a vision, a dream, or an ideal.