We are pleased to announce a double exhibition by photographer Anastasia Samoylova and sculptor Olaf Metzel.
In their works, both Samoylova and Metzel negotiate current political issues and provoke reflection on socio-cultural questions.
In her artistic practice, Anastasia Samoylova employs strategies of commercial photography to illuminate the interface between staged perception and reality. In this visual study Floridas, the artist depicts the Sunshine State in all its contradictions as both a shimmering fantasy and a subtropical dystopia, marked as much by deep political division as by the effects of the climate crisis. FloodZone is an extensive photographic project that explores the environmental change in America’s coastal cities. In the process, her works recount colorful emptiness, bombastic materialism, and cultural artificiality to reveal nothing less than existential threats and bleakness.
Olaf Metzel’s expansive sculptures combine formal aesthetic questions with social observations from the present. The artist became known for sensational works in public space. With an eye for current socio-political issues and a focus on the complexity of German history and culture, these not infrequently led to controversial discussions. In addition to these monumental public works, Metzel has created a diverse sculptural oeuvre, including folding, crumpling, compressing, and bending aluminum plates imprinted with words and images. The deformation and destruction serve him here both as an artistic means and as an aesthetic provocation.
