TEFAF Maastricht: Cities, like dreams. An Exhibition by Daniel Crouch Rare Books & Michael Hoppen Gallery

Maastricht, March 2026 — At TEFAF Maastricht 2026, Daniel Crouch Rare Books and Michael Hoppen Gallery join forces to present Cities, like dreams, an unprecedented dialogue between Enlightenment cartography and contemporary photography. Through a series of ten pairings, the exhibition explores how urban landscapes are shaped as much by imagination as by design, tracing the evolving ways that cities are mapped, seen, and remembered.

At its heart, Cities, like dreams juxtaposes monumental eighteenth-century town plans—icons of clarity and reason—with the intricate photographic dioramas of Japanese artist Sohei Nishino, whose works reconstruct cities through thousands of images taken on foot during his long, intuitive wanderings. The result is a poetic conversation between past and present, mapping and memory, geometry and emotion.

The exhibition features exceptional cartographic masterworks: John Rocque’s vast Plan of London (1746); Louis Bretez and Michel-Étienne Turgot’s bird’s-eye Plan de Paris (1739); Bernard Ratzer’s Plan of New York (1767); Suharaya Mohe’s Map of Edo (Tokyo, eighteenth century); Ludovico Ughi’s meticulous plan of Venice (1729); Daniel Stalpaert’s Platte-Grondt van de Oude en Nieuwe Royinge der Stat Amsterdam (1720); Samuel von Schmettau’s Kupferkarte von Berlin (1748); and Giovanni Battista Nolli’s groundbreaking Pianta Grande di Roma (1748). Each work marks a triumph of Enlightenment rationality and craftsmanship - a vision of the city as knowable, ordered, and complete.

In dialogue with them, Nishino’s Diorama Maps of London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Rome transform those same cities into fluid, dreamlike constellations. Constructed from thousands of overlapping photographs, his collages dissolve linear perspective and replace accuracy with intimacy. The city becomes an accumulation of moments, footsteps, and memories - an atlas not of streets, but of experience.

By uniting these contrasting visions, Cities, like dreams reveals that every map is also a mirror: a record of human desire, fear, and the eternal search to give form to the invisible. Through the collaboration of Daniel Crouch Rare Books, specialists in rare and historic maps, and Michael Hoppen Gallery, leaders in contemporary photographic art, the exhibition transforms TEFAF into a cartographic theatre of time - an invitation to see that cities, like dreams, are never truly finished.