The luminous portraits of the Polish photographer, based in Berlin, offer visual escapes at the border between fashion and fine art.
Olga Urbanek explores human solitude and the connection between the body, clothing, and environment in images flooded with color. A graduate in art history from Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University and in production from the Film and Television Academy, both located in Warsaw, she left her native Poland to settle in Iceland. Leaving everything behind proved to be the best decision, allowing her to start over and live the life she had dreamed of. Since then, this 36-year-old virtuoso has pursued photography independently, winning first prize in the Fine Art category of the Chromatic Awards in 2018. The following year, she was a finalist for the Sony World Photography Awards and the Month of Photography in Los Angeles. In 2023, Olga Urbanek held numerous exhibitions in Berlin and Warsaw. Her portraits possess the gift of capturing and interacting with their subjects in an interplay of shapes, colors, and textures.
CONTEMPLATIVE FLIGHTS
From a plain background to a sandy, verdant, rocky, or stony landscape, her compositions are subtly laden with information, naturally flirting with fashion and fine art. Her work is always bathed in light and contrast. She plays with sharp, pointed shapes,
Sculptural, swirling, blurred, in motion, urging us to live from experiences and not from material things. Like these models whose clothes ripple like waves, these bodies sculpted like rocks on the sand, this hair that blazes in the sun or that
They undulate like fans. The photographer not only celebrates the beauty and unique language of the naked body, but also establishes a dialogue between silhouette and clothing. Take, for example, the serene model in her voluminous tulle dress or the model ready to leap in her fitness outfit, both asserting themselves and blending into the natural environment. Olga Urbanek thus reaches the culmination—narrative, poetic, and visual—of her photographic explorations.
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