Born in 1962 in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, Alexey Titarenko has been taking photographs for over thirty years, in four major cities: St. Petersburg, Venice, Havana, and New York. Alexey Titarenko: The City is a Novel, currently on view at Nailya Alexander gallery in New York, brings together, for the first time, prints from every phase of Titarenko’s career, including rarely exhibited photomontages from his first series entitled Nomenclature of Signs; key photographs from his series City of Shadows; and others produced within the past year.
This exhibition takes its title from Titarenko’s monograph of the same name, published in 2015 by Damiani editore and selected by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best photobooks of the year. For Titarenko, the city not only shapes and influences each individual’s mindset and point of view; it is also a creative force, the architect of narratives in which each of us becomes his or her own distinct character. As an artist, his work is to bring to light these stories through his own lens, and to outline their symbolic meaning. As he writes in his essay City of Shadows, “Universal emotions perpetuated during the last century…constitute the main themes of my photographs, to the extent of transforming the most documentary among them into elements of a novel — not reportage, but a novel, whose central theme is the human soul.”
Alexey Titarenko: The City is a Novel
March 22 to May 20, 2017
Nailya Alexander Gallery
41 E 57th St #704
New York, NY 10022
USA
