Anastasia Samoylova
MANGROVES—OVERPAINTED PHOTOGRAPHS
AIPAD 2024 Feature

Laurence Miller Gallery is pleased to exhibit MANGROVES, a dynamic new body of photo-based multimedia work by Anastasia Samoylova at the 2024 Photography show presented by AIPAD, on view at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, April 25 - 28, 2024.

Anastasia Samoylova’s new series of overpainted and collaged photographs is an extension of her acclaimed FloodZone and Floridas series, both of which examine the environmental and cultural landscape of the Sunshine State. One of the distinct features of that photographic work, which carries over here, is that a particular visual language has emerged out of the Floridian locale, made up of the state’s flora and fauna, cultural signifiers, and lush vibrant color (frequently shot through with a heaping dose of Miami's coral pink). In her purely photographic work she has always had a collage-like approach to combining visual information, and has photographed her own assemblages in the past, so this multimedia approach is a natural progression.

Her painterly embellishments can seem like an outgrowth of the fecund landscapes she shoots with her camera, as if the riotous tropics cannot be confined within the borders of the photographic image. Florida’s native Mangrove trees make frequent appearances as a kind of leitmotif in her work, and their tangled aquatic root systems are of a piece with the densely wild accumulation of gesture and imagery in Samoylova’s painted photos. The works overall suggest the irrepressible energy of a subtropical ecosystem, as well as the proliferative efforts by the real estate and tourist industries, to shape and market this landscape as a luxury oasis. 

Samoylova is keenly aware of art history and positions her work in conversation with past practitioners, an approach that has been highlighted most prominently by Steidl’s recent publication of the book FLORIDAS, which pairs her work with Walker Evans’ own photography in the state. In the painted photographs we see Florida by way of Germany, as the presence of three German painters looms large. Her paint handling evokes the Sturm und Drang of Albert Oehlin’s abstractions, and her recombining of cultural imagery is suggestive of Sigmar Polke’s “Capitalist Realism”. Most directly the works evoke Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted Photographs, works that Richter has made since the 1980s, as part of his career long examination of the intersection of photography and painting. As with all her influences, Samoylova synthesizes these elements so that her own unmistakable voice emerges, guided by a timely sense of inquiry—knowing that we study history to better understand our own place in it. 

Samoylova’s focus on Florida has always been at once specific to the place, while at the same time embracing the way that the state functions as a destination point within the United States as a whole, a place where an entire nation projects its own ideas onto the sun and surf. Her painted photographs embrace this composite nature, where different ideas intersect with the realities of an actual place, and the precarious nature of abundant ecosystems that are transforming before our eyes. This sense of transformation is what her painterly embellishments evoke most, describing how the ever changing world around us is shaped but never tamed by us.