MARIA SVARBOVA, REMOTE ______CONTROL
An award-winning photographer stages compositions mixing brutalist aesthetics with the fragility of apparently emotionless human characters. She held solo exhibitions in Europe, the US, Mexico and South Asia, clients of commissioned works include Apple, and she published a several best-selling photo albums.
Her work has been featured in international media outlets such as The Guardian, Vogue, Forbes, CNN or The New York Times.
From 2014, she started to explore the themes reflected in the series “Swimming pools” or “Futuro retro” and found her visual language: It is primarily in an era she did not experience, the period of late socialism, that she found inspiration, creating unique atmospheres that distinguish from “nostalgia” by the modernity and timelessness they convey.
As most of the artist’s work is set in Bratislava and Slovakia, many of the iconic places which are represented in this exhibition have a meaning of their own. In a country born exactly 30 years ago, which undergone several, simultaneous transformations, the question of what is distinctive of Slovak urban, cultural and creative landscape craves for an answer. Perhaps this exhibition is contributing to draw the response. By representing those buildings and spaces through a contemporary visual palette, the photographer-painter Maria Svarbova demonstrates they do not belong to the past, but to the people, and that reinventing them for contemporary needs and use, makes arguably greater sense than their obliteration from both urban landscape and collective memory.
Curator: Laura Serra Forest (Kolektiv Cité Radieuse)
