A unique object, this archival pigment photograph print on aluminum has extensive hand-applied paint embellishments. It is profusely hand-inked, intentionally scratched, signed, titled, dated and annotated in pencil on the reverse, and is in overall excellent condition. This of one of a kind intervened artworks produced in 2009 and 2010 marks Isaza's artistic shift from traditional fashion photography into fine art. It was at this time that Isaza began to explore beyond the camera lens through the process of applying physical interventions onto his printed images, using paint, crayon, tape, graphite and other such unconventional materials. This process gave him an avenue to explore photography to a larger developed scale, giving space for his female subjects to be depicted with more of a sense of grandeur.
Standing Ballet, 2010
Efren Isaza
Standing Ballet, 2010
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminum intervened by the artist
Dimensions: 65 H x 48 W in.
Signed, titled, dated, and annotated on verso by the artist.
Efren Isaza, one of Colombia’s most influential fashion photographers, initially studied fashion design. He united his interest in fashion with one of his earliest passions: photography. Graceful female figures lounge in fashionable poses. Paper costumes that seem borrowed from Oskar Schlemmer’s triadic ballet make the ballerinas look like marionettes.
Their dislocation recalls the puppets Hans Bellmer featured in his surreal photographic experiments. Frida Kahlo’s face with her dark, furrowed eyebrows, peers at the viewer out of different scenes; her hair is knotted artfully on her head.The allusions evoked in the imaginative creations of Colombian Fashion photographer Isaza are diverse: he cites and alienates an arsenal of styles before melding them into new compositions OF ONE OF A KIND LIMITED EDITION ARTWORK. It might be a certain scene, a poem, a petal of a flower, or the idea of a person that inspires a new work. His passion for breaking the boundaries of traditional fashion photography is palpable in each of Isaza’s unique works. He is less concerned with fashion than the image, the play of contrasts and the magic and the emotions sometimes saturnine,sometimes buoyant, sometimes surreal, and yet always beguiling that the image transports.
