Gallery S O London is delighted to present an exhibition of Annelies Štrba’s series of photographs, spanning ten years of activity.

Štrba came to prominence in the early 90’s with an extensive project called “Shades of Time”, started in 1974. The series depicted her family and their home near Lake Zürich, Switzerland; it has remained forever a present topic in her work. The exhibition focuses on recent works from the series of Nyima, Aya and Brontë. In these the familiar dimension of her earlier works evolved in a renewed interest in the relationship between inner and outer worlds. Her technique in relation to the latter part of her career, blurring boundaries between the individual and the surroundings through her mastery of the digital alteration of shapes and intensity of colours, has been defined as Digital Impressionism.

In the Nyima series, Štrba melts oneiric natural settings with sleeping female figures. These compositions are far from being motionless. According to the author, the stillness of the girls asleep allows the viewer to become active in front of the pictures, to join the interplay between the outward psychedelic landscape and inner dream imagery.

Štrba photographs are an assiduous investigation of the female psyche, becoming a symbolic kernel which can bewitch - as if part of a spell - the familiar into the fantastic. Her photographs transform previously conceived banal activities, like sleeping, hair combing and strolling through mountainous landscapes, into an otherworldly experience.

In the Brontë series, Štrba depicts members of her family in the Brontë sisters' home in Yorkshire. Contextualizing her ‘fairy tales of the unconscious’ in a place dear to collective memory, Štrba balances the weight of past narratives with the dreamy, yet uncanny, tenderness of her Universe.

Text by Valentina Bin, 2013

Annelies Štrba (b. 1947 Zug, Switzerland) is a video artist and photographer, who has had numerous exhibitions internationally, including large thematic exhibitions such as “Alice in Wonderland” at Tate Liverpool and Museum of Modern, Contemporary art of Trento e Rovereto and Kunsthalle Hamburg (2012); The Bronte Parsonage Museum, Haworth, GB (2008); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2008), Barbican Centre, London (2006); Rudolfinum, Prag (2005) Architecture Biennial in Venice (2004); New Museum in New York (1999) and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1997). Her photographs belong to important collections such as the Kunsthalle Hamburg, the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris and Deutsche Bank.

S O Gallery
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