Anastasia Samoylova. Image Cities

From June 7th to July 22nd, 2023

Sabrina Amrani Gallery

Madera, 23. Madrid. Spain

Anastasia Samoylova was the winner of the first edition of the international KBr Photo Award, launched by Fundación MAPFRE in 2021, with her project Image Cities. The artist travels through seventeen cities —including New York, Paris, London, Zurich, Tokyo and Milan— and capture the images that saturate the facades, buses, etc.: fashion and beauty brands, bank and real estate advertisements, in such a way that she produces a critical and lyrical study of how the former exert their influence on the urban inhabitants.

Because both the novelty of urban design or reinterpretation and the advertising media of big cities attract our attention because they are nothing more than the medium that offers us a promise of happiness: anyone could transcend their everyday life and aspire to another, better life. In Image Cities, Samoylova collects and interprets the messages that cities articulate in order for us to achieve this goal.

The artist uses different pictorial strategies to hybridise figure and environment. Through the use of a telephoto lens, which allows the artist to compress the visual space and blur the distinctions between figure and background, she proposes a visual language. Throughout Image Cities, this mode of visual synthesis makes it difficult to separate the singular human from the cultural constructs that surround them, reflecting the communion between the produced and the consuming.

Sabrina Amrani now presents a selection of works from Anastasia Samoylova's Image Cities project. The exhibition invites us on an expansive tour through the world's most important urban centres, which form an interconnected global network of cultural and economic influence.

ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA

Moscow, 1984. Between observational photography, studio practice and installation. Samoylova’s work is not about disaster and catastrophe. She explores and evidence the complex relationship between the nature and human society. Her photography plays around the collective memories and the narratives of geography.

Samoylova received her MFA from Bradley University and MA in Environmental Design from the Russian State University for the Humanities. In 2021 Samoylova won the first edition of the KBr Photo Award.

In 2020 she had her first solo museum exhibition of ongoing project FloodZone at USF Contemporary Art Museum (Tampa, USA). Recently, her work was presented at the Biennale for Contemporary Photography in Germany, Perez Art Museum in Miami (USA); Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago (USA); The Print Center (USA); Aperture Foundation in NYC (USA); The Chrysler Museum of Art (USA); History Miami Museum (USA), to name a few. Her work is in private and institutional collections as the Perez Art Museum Miami, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, and Art Slant Collection in Paris, among others.

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