Alexey Titarenko: Photography (1986–2010)

Alexey Titarenka, born in 1962 in Petresburg, educated in this city and living in New York for over a decade, I met in the fall of 2009. We met in the artist's apartment near the campus of Columbia University - I had the impression that everything in it was subordinated to creation. Titarenka in his work is clearly interested in the connection between the memory of architecture and the trace of contemporary human existence. The artist focuses on incidentality, and thus also a certain unpredictability of each recorded situation. As Wojciech Wilczyk notes in the text accompanying our exhibition, "Titarenko has been photographing cities with a clear urban shape for almost 30 years, but those in which the process of development and change has been - in the whole area or in part - somehow inhibited, sort of frozen. Therefore, the object of his visual explorations made first his native Petersburg, then Venice, Havana and recently, which should come as no surprise here, Łódź. Looking at his photographs, where in the scenery of nineteenth-century or older architecture, the inhabitants recorded during long exhibitions are more or less blurred traces of their physical presence, one can recall the term "aura" used by Walter Benjamin, defined by the author A little history of photography, as: "they gave a manifestation, no matter how close a given thing may be". 

As part of Alexey Titarenka's individual exhibition at Atlas Sztuki, we will show photographs from 1986-2010 from several cycles: Venice, Havana, St. Petersburg, Black and white magic St. St. Petersburg, City of Shadows, Time Stopped. Among the 81 works of the artist, we will present two made in the fall of 2010 in Łódź entitled Sunrise I Sunset. 
I highly recommend reading the aforementioned text on the work of Alexey Titarenko by Wojciech Wilczyk and the essay by Peggy Sue Amison, an American curator who has been living in Ireland for years. The interview with the artist was conducted by Anna Żebrowska, an expert on Russian culture - PhD in Russian philology, a long-time journalist and former correspondent of Gazeta Wyborcza in Moscow. 

I cordially invite you to visit the Atlas Sztuki and meet the work of Alexey Titarenka.