ANNELIES STRBA

Overview

With this book you can immerse yourself in the world of Annelies Štrba. Let yourself be enchanted by the magic of these hitherto unseen pictorial worlds.

Annelies Štrba’s world is one of phantasms, intuitions, imprecations, the hidden and of fairy tales and myths. It is a world in which there are still wizards and travelling folk. She is undoubtedly one of the most significant and interesting contemporary photography and video artists.

Whilst Štrba’s early works in the 1980s and 1990s took the form of a kind of personal diary, her work experienced its actual artistic emancipation in the middle of the 1990s, during her travels through Japan and Great Britain. From 1997 Štrba started using only the video camera, isolating individual film stills as artistic prints and independent works of art. Štrba is moving towards ‘fantastical images’ with her current work. Owing to the extreme intimacy of her shots, her ‘family portraits’ succeed in bringing viewers face to face with their own memories and emotions. Intimate and trance-like qualities are a constant feature of her works. Štrba is a shaman, within whom the energy fields of many generations and genders seem to come together. She is a visionary of the world as a whole, which we have increasingly lost touch with.

The method behind her depictions and their transposition into new realities are a thoroughly unique concept, which she has been pursuing since 2009 and which is virtually unparalleled. Her group of works entitled ‘My Life Dreams’, a composition inspired by the world of artificially created stories, appears as the pinnacle of her work so far, but at the same time it is a consistent continuation of all her previous work.