Anastasia Samoylova: Image Cities

The exhibition Image Cities by the photographer Anastasia Samoylova is the culmination of the first edition of the KBr Photo Award launched by Fundación MAPFRE in 2021. This is a biannual competition which brings the winner a significant cash prize, the organization and installation of an exhibition of the chosen project at the KBr Fundación MAPFRE exhibition space in Barcelona and at the Fundación’s space in Madrid, and the publication of an accompanying book.

Through the 50 photographs selected from more than 200, Anastasia Samoylova presents Image Cities, a visual study of the increasingly close integration of the photographic image and the urban environment. The project began in Moscow and in New York in the early summer of 2021 and was completed in additional cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, London, Brussels, Tokyo, Madrid and Barcelona thanks to the KBr Photo Award. The artist traversed these cities, photographing buildings in the process of construction which appear alongside advertisements for top fashion and beauty brands, banks, real estate agencies, etc., The ads are visible on façades, billboards, buses and other surfaces. These publicity images, often on a monumental scale, are common to all major metropolitan centers with the result that the cities themselves itself lose their individuality and become a single, homogeneous one.

Her photographs create collages that combine the real and the fictitious in which human presence is almost entirely absent, or if figures do appear they are on a tiny scale in comparison to the vast size of the buildings and advertisements.

Hours:
Until March 30: Tuesday–Sunday (and holidays) 11am–7pm
From April 1: Tuesday–Sunday (and holidays): 11am–8pm