Anastasia Samoylova at Fundación MAPFRE Barcelona
Solo exhibition Image Cities
On view from February 16 until May 14, 2023
Fundación MAPFRE presents the exhibition Image Cities by the photographer Anastasia Samoylova. Image Cities represents the winning entry in the first edition of the KBr Photo Award launched by Fundación MAPFRE in 2021.
Image Cities, Anastasia Samoylova’s winning project, is a visual study of the increasing integration of the photographic image and the urban environment. Our cities are becoming collages. Lifestyle advertising, real-estate billboards, and hyper-photogenic architecture make city space feel like a fantasy stage set of ever-shifting scenery. International brands smother local history. Global capitalism imposes its visual order.
The exhibition is structured around 50 photographs selected from those that make up the project Image Cities, a body of work that acquires its full meaning as a series, as it is precisely that serial nature which makes the city and its individuality disappear. The persons visible in these urban settings walk along the streets with seeming indifference, almost invariably self-absorbed and located in front of large buildings and billboards featuring advertisements for new luxury real estate projects, fashionable perfumes and beauty products. In all these images – which are brightly colored and have crisp outlines as well as interplays of reflections and compositions structured through successions of planes – Samoylova emphasizes the monumental scale of the buildings and skyscrapers in relation to any other motif in the image.
Fundación MAPFRE Barcelona
Centro de Fotografía KBr, Avenida Litoral, 30 – 08005 Barcelona
Tuesday – Sunday: 11 am – 8 pm