The luminous portraits by the Berlin-based Polish photographer offer visual escapes on the borderline between fashion and fine art.
Olga Urbanek probes human solitude and the connection between body, clothes and environment in images awash with colour. This former graduate in art history at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University and in production at the Academy of Film and Television, both in Warsaw, left her native Poland to settle in Iceland. Giving up everything was the best decision for her, allowing her to start afresh and live the life of her dreams. Since then, the 36-year-old virtuoso has taken up self-taught photography, winning first prize in the Fine Arts category of the Chromatic Awards in 2018. The following year, she was a finalist at the Sony World Photography Awards and the Los Angeles Month of Photography. In 2023, Olga Urbanek held a series of exhibitions in Berlin and Warsaw. Her portraits have that gift of knowing how to fix and dance with her subjects in a tangle of shapes, colours and textures.
CONTEMPLATIVE FLIGHTS
From a plain background to a sandy, green, rocky or stony landscape, her compositions are subtly charged with information, naturally flirting with fashion and fine art. Her work is always bathed in light and contrast. She plays with sharp, sculptural, swirling, blurred, moving forms, exhorting us to live from experience, not materiality. Like the models whose clothes undulate like waves, whose bodies are sculpted like rocks in the sand, whose hair blazes in the sun or undulates like fans. The photographer not only makes room for the beauty and unique language of the naked body, but also establishes a dialogue between silhouette and clothing. Take, for example, the serene model in her extra-volume tulle dress, or the model ready to pounce in her fitness outfit, imposing herself as much as she blends into the natural environment. In this way, Olga Urbanek reaches the narrative, poetic and visual culmination of her photographic explorations.
Crédits photos :
- Olga Urbanek, Rodeo girl off duty, 2023
- .Olga Urbanek. Anna, 2019
- Olga Urbanek, No title, 2020
- Olga Urbanek, Eve, 2019
- Olga Urbanek, Kopi – Fungi collection, 2022