An essential artist on the contemporary scene, Anna Malagrida has been developing impressively coherent photographic and video work since the end of the 1990s. She approaches political subjects with great poetic delicacy while working with subtlety on the staging and playing with light and chiaroscuro, conbining photography and pictorial art in the same movement.
Anna Malagrida (Barcelona, 1970) has lived in Paris since 2004. She practices photography and video. Often conceived around the dialectical opposition between interior and exterior, her pieces invite the viewer to an experience that is both intuitive and physical, carried by the meaning at work in the photographs. The window, the veil or the border are some of the motifs she uses to bring the different spaces into dialogue and talk about duality, the unstable and the ambiguous, as opposed to the unambiguous.
Her trajectory as a photographer began in 1988, when she enrolled at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where she obtained a degree in Information Sciences. Determined to work with the photographic medium, she continued her training at the National School of Photography in Arles in 1993.
Since 1998, she has developed more personal works. Her images begin to structure themselves around a poetics of opposition between interior and exterior spaces, light and darkness, transparency and opacity, reality and representation; she endeavors to probe the relationship between photography and the contemporary world.
Anna Malagrida won the Prize for the Project of the Rencontres internationales de la Photographie in 2005 and obtained the grant from the Arte y Derechef Foundation in 2006. She is also the winner of the Carte Blanche PMU in partnership with the Center Pompidou in 2016 and of the commission 3.0 from the Center National Arts Plastiques and the Jeu de Paume in 2020. Exhibited in France and internationally (Spain, France, South Africa, Germany, Denmark, etc.), her work has joined numerous public and private collections (Centre Pompidou , the Wolfsburg KunstMuseum, MAGASIN 3, Stockholm Konsthall, National Fund for Fine Arts, MACBA of Barcelona, the MAPFRE Foundation, etc.).
There is in her approach the obvious trace of a constant reflection on the status of the image in the news, the limits of photography and the duality of the gaze. This issue revolves around one of the recurring motifs in the history of art, the window, the absolute protagonist of all her work. A window that has a strategic role: it is the boundary between interior and exterior, through which the artist invites the viewer to communicate with the photographic image itself. Both framing and connecting device, it is sometimes a simple transparent glass that does not interfere with our perception, but on other occasions takes on a deliberately pictorial character, referring us to European informal art as well as to the American abstract expressionism.
However, not everything is visible in the work of Anna Malagrida. The frame of the window always implies an off-screen inviting the spectator, in his contemplation, to deploy his imagination. This interest in the spectator’s experience refers to the notion of the voyeur and allows us to reflect on the gaze, the essence of the visible.
For Anna Malagrida, photography is more than a faithful reflection of reality, its modalities go far beyond the traditional notion of the snapshot. Beyond representation, she constructs images where the trace of reality is palpable, creating pieces as poetic as they are contained. Her work takes on a very particular dimension, the camera sending us back, while revealing an exterior to us, to our intimate, interior space.
Anna Malagrida : L’Attente
from January 17 to March 5, 2023
La Filature, Scène nationale de Mulhouse
20 allée Nathan Katz
68100 Mulhouse, France
www.lafilature.org
Opening January 27. 7 p.m.
in the presence of Anna Malagrida
