Borys Makary’s two projects will be shown at the most important places on the exhibition map of Europe. The photographs from the Polish Misia project will be presented at the WeArt festival in Barcelona, and the They Were series at the Fotofever art fair in the Louvre, where Makary will be represented by the NUE gallery.
In the Polish Misia project, women demonstrate their love towards their plush toys. The project consists of 100 photographs of “ordinary” girls standing naked in front of the lens along with their teddy bears. The photographic story is completed with memories associated with their “plush friend”.
In this work, the artist oscillates between documentary and creation. Polish Misia is an ironic commentary on the overly-eroticised image of women in contemporary popular culture. The photographer played the role of a director, creating phenomenons by “faking” reality and fabricating “facts” considered to be true.
The They Were project boils down to a Man Ray-esque imaging of reality through the use of negatives, on which the author manually painted signs and digits symbolizing the personality of the character depicted in the photograph. The starting point was numerology and hidden symbols that were meant to tell something about the given person while avoiding literalism.
Each of They Were's fifteen photographs tells the story of a different woman. These graphic images – hand-painted by the author – intrigue and captivate the viewer, prompting an analysis of the complex patterns of personalities. Borys Makary leaves the viewer freedom to interpret his works’ meanings.
The project has previously been shown, among others, at the NUE.1 exhibition at the Paris NUE gallery.
Borys Makary is a graduate of the Department of Photography of the Faculty of Multimedia Communication at the University of Arts in Poznań. He learned fashion photography from Miles Aldridge and at the International Center of Photography in New York, and worked for IMG models, one of the most important modelling agencies. He was also an assistant to the fashion photographer Richard Warren. Makary currently cooperates with many advertising agencies and fashion magazines in Poland and abroad, whilst simultaneously working on his own projects.
Direct links:
- the Paris exhibiton
- the Barcelona exhibition
Source: press release, ed. DS, transl. szm, October 2014