Annelies Strba
12 Jan - 23 Feb 2013
ANNELIES STRBA
My Life's Dreams
12 January – 23 February 2013
„In recent years Annelies Štrba's photographs have become increasingly distant from her early depictions of domestic life, and ,My Life's Dreams' is a telling indication of where her heart now lies. She has become a storyteller, spinning tales and weaving plots, (...) In ,My Life's Dreams' there are many photographs of sleeping girls, all of them evocative of the traditional story of Sleeping Beauty. They suggest, more than anything else, a desire for the preservation of innocence and wonder. If ,Shades of Time' dwelt on the pressures of motherhood and the burdens of mortality, these images embody a wish to escape from them, and to do so with grace and beauty. There are hints, nevertheless, of the impossibility of such a quest. The oddly self-contained girls in the woods, so pretty and fair, bear with them enough traces of contemporary life to hint at their displacement in this wonderland, and the hallucinatory, often acidic, colour of the images gives them a sharp and sometimes alarming edge. In contrast, the layered textiles and wooden interiors, as well as the poppies, forests and mountainous landscapes, are reminiscent of old European fairy tales and the exotic orientalism of the stories of the Arabian Nights. These images, which exclude the banality and ugliness of ordinary life as well as every aspect of the masculine, create a realm of ethereal femininity, of powerful dreaming, sleep and unconsciousness. It is a drowsy, heavy and beautiful world, a temporary shelter from the cold gaze of the Grim Reaper.
(John Hutchinson, abstract of the catalogue: My Life's Dreams, Stuttgart, 2012)
My Life's Dreams
12 January – 23 February 2013
„In recent years Annelies Štrba's photographs have become increasingly distant from her early depictions of domestic life, and ,My Life's Dreams' is a telling indication of where her heart now lies. She has become a storyteller, spinning tales and weaving plots, (...) In ,My Life's Dreams' there are many photographs of sleeping girls, all of them evocative of the traditional story of Sleeping Beauty. They suggest, more than anything else, a desire for the preservation of innocence and wonder. If ,Shades of Time' dwelt on the pressures of motherhood and the burdens of mortality, these images embody a wish to escape from them, and to do so with grace and beauty. There are hints, nevertheless, of the impossibility of such a quest. The oddly self-contained girls in the woods, so pretty and fair, bear with them enough traces of contemporary life to hint at their displacement in this wonderland, and the hallucinatory, often acidic, colour of the images gives them a sharp and sometimes alarming edge. In contrast, the layered textiles and wooden interiors, as well as the poppies, forests and mountainous landscapes, are reminiscent of old European fairy tales and the exotic orientalism of the stories of the Arabian Nights. These images, which exclude the banality and ugliness of ordinary life as well as every aspect of the masculine, create a realm of ethereal femininity, of powerful dreaming, sleep and unconsciousness. It is a drowsy, heavy and beautiful world, a temporary shelter from the cold gaze of the Grim Reaper.
(John Hutchinson, abstract of the catalogue: My Life's Dreams, Stuttgart, 2012)