NYAB Event - Antonio Girbes "Delirious City"

Antonio Girbes "Delirious City"

Galeria Ramis Barquet (Chelsea)

This event has ended.

Ramis Barquet presents Delirious City by Antonio Girbés (b.1952). Over the last six years the photography of the Spanish native, has addressed the urban space from a visual, geometrical perspective with images of buildings and architectural elements deformed, multiplied and spatially contorted. Describing the works as “the construction of an excessive, unreal city out of time”, to this end the artist extracts and reinterprets fragments of architecture from his travels to Paris, Moscow, Venice, New York, Shanghai, Barcelona and Vienna. His work incorporates the city planning and architecture of seminal figures like Lluís Doménech i Montaner, Antoni Gaudí or Otto Wagner, as well as contemporary architects like Norman Foster or the Russian architect Alexey Dushkin: “I reinterpret these bits of reality, bestowing them with a new function, distinct from what the architect planned for the original building”.

Girbés explains, “The outcome, often mistakenly believed to be a collage of various images, is always based on one single photo, which I still take with the same analog camera I’ve always used.” As a result, starting out from an analogical snapshot captured on his Hasselblad, each image is scanned and meticulously processed by the artist to create divisions, repetitions and mirror plays.

Despite a strong artistic interest from an early age, it was only at the end of the 1970´s that Girbés decided to complete his professional training, at the prestigious American School of Photography, Paris, then under the direction of Jocelyn Karger, the Art Director of Condé Nast. It was here he associated with leading artists that were to deeply influence his work - including Reinhart Wolf, Helmut Newton, Guy Burdin, and Horst P. Horst, for whom he worked as an assistant in 1980.

A recipient of numerous international awards and accolades, his work was most recently selected for the Venice Biennale in 2006. He also contributed to the project Real Venice, included in the 54th Venice Biennale 2011 with a large exhibition on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. His work has been displayed in New York, Paris, Vienna, Rome, Moscow and Tokyo, and has also been featured in many private and public collections, including the Estée Lauder Foundation, the Illy Collection, Gianni Agnelli, Guido Orsi, La Caixa Foundation and the Musée de l’Elysée.