description

Albarrán Cabrera

Albarrán Cabrera
The Mouth of Krishna SE #60908, 2022
Pigments on Japanese paper and gold leaf
32 x 48 cm
Edition of 10

Provenance

Spain

Detail Description

Angel Albarrán (b.1969, Barcelona) and Anna Cabrera (b. 1969, Se- villa) have worked collaboratively as art photographers since 1996. A rich inner philosophy about memory and experience — and a special curiosity for photographic chemistry — guide their aesthetic practice. Influenced by both occidental and oriental thinkers and artists, their photographs question our assumptions of time, place and identity in order to stimulate a new understanding of our own experience and perception. For the artists, “being conscious of our surroundings isn’t just an important part of life —our surroundings and how we interpret them is life as we know it.”



Albarrán Cabrera find very interesting subjects such as time, reality, existence, identity and empathy, but what they find the most fascinating is the relation between them. These relations are difficult to explain by means of words and that is why they rely on images.



«We are particularly interested in memories. Our aim is to play with viewers’ memories and to construct a representation inside their minds. We never know what the final result will be, because individuals have their own exclusive memories and have grown up in different cultures and environments. Our images are the bare bones of this mental construction. There is a gap between reality and what we understand as real. And photography (as Japanese dramatist Chikamatsu once said about art) lies on the frontier between the real and the unreal, the true and the false. Photography helps us to ‘see’ what is hidden from us. »



Albarrán Cabrera see their photographs as objects in their own right: they personally handcraft their prints in their studio using a wide range of processes and materials. Blending elements of the Eastern art tradition with the light, colours, and moods of Western painting, they achieve a balance between the two in their prints. As Albarrán Cabrera have pointed out “this wide range of processes and materials serve a single purpose: to give us far more parameters to play with the viewer’s imagination than a mere image. The texture, colour, finishing, tones – even the border – of a print can provide the viewer with valuable information.”



The work of Albarrán Cabrera has been exhibited in Spain, Japan, Switzerland, USA, Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Germany, Lebanon, and Italy. Private collections and institutions that house their photographs include Hermès, Goetz Collection, The German Bundestag’s Art Collection, Banco de Santander and De Nederlandsche Bank among others. They have also produced photographic prints for institutions such as Fundació La Pedrera, Barcelona; Fundació Toni Catany, Mallorca; Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid; FotoColectania, Barcelona; the Photographic Archive, Barcelona. They have also collaborated with publishers such as Adelphi Edizioni, Mondadori Libri, Penguin Random House, Diogenes Verlag, RM Verlag and Ediciones Atalanta as well as institutions such as La Monnaie De Munt, -Belgium’s federal opera house-.