ADAPTATION, Anastasia Samoylova
In November I visited ADAPTATION, a major exhibition from Russian-born American artist Anastasia Samoylova, curated by Taous R. Dahmani, at Saatchi Gallery. I was entranced by the artist’s excellent eye and skill for capturing a complex narrative within a perfectly composed shot. Her work tells moving stories for the viewer to discover, portrayed in beautiful images, with delicate colour palettes. Pastel pinks, soft blues and earthy greens, showing calm yet impactful scenes.
The exhibition comprises four rooms, spanning the top floor of the Saatchi Gallery. Each room holds a selection of work covering five series, differentiated by the colour of accent walls, giving a distinct feeling for each body of work. One room showed pieces from the ‘Image Cities’ series, a collection of street photography, inviting you into small human moments; window reflections blurring lights, people and posters to create hazy scenes of city life. This instantly showed the artist’s confident eye. One photo that caught my attention shows a woman sitting on a chair outside a cafe, her phone and coffee perched on a windowsill, on a video call with a friend. This small representation of human interaction felt so intimate and familiar, it stood out to me among the bolder images of billboards and pink poodles.
The ‘FloodZone’ and ‘Floridas’ series are great examples of the artist’s ability to explore a heavy narrative with considered delicacy. Two pieces from ‘FloodZone’ that instantly caught my attention were displayed together, framed against a deep green accent wall.
On the left is ‘Staircase at King Tide, Hollywood’. The image is a perfect soft pink, drawing the viewer into the piece, and shows a staircase submerged in water. The pink wall behind the staircase has a grainy texture, its colour reflected in the gently rippling water in the foreground. Against this softness, the sharp focus of the staircase draws your eye to the centre of the piece, its crisp lines reflected in the water, creating a clean geometric silhouette. The elegance of the image contradicts the devastation of the floods which have created this reflection.
On the right is ’The Tea Room, Vizcaya’. In this image, the photographer again captures an eerily peaceful depiction of the devastation of flooding. This time, the colour palette is nearly monochromatic, with the exception of the soft green architectural detailings. The subject is the tea room, a structure with intricate panelling and archways looking out towards the horizon lines. A layer of water covers the tiled pattern on the floor, casting crisp reflections, with the water level continuing out of the archways, eventually meeting the sky in a layer of grey stretching as far as the eye can see.
The quiet within the images in this series, mostly without the presence of people, shows the beauty of a world slowly being lost. For me, this representation of natural disaster has a much deeper impact than the graphic images we so often see on the news.
The room adjacent to this one is uplifting in its bright, playful displays. Here the two series’ ‘Landscape Sublime’ and ‘Breakfasts’ are displayed. These pieces feel less heavy in narrative, with more of a focus on process. ‘Landscape Sublime’ is a series of collages, comprising landscape photos taken across seasons in complex and distorting structures. A time-lapse video confirms that the artist constructed these three dimensional collages in real life, before taking the final photos. ‘Breakfasts’ is a series of 10 photos, displayed as unframed square prints along the wall. These images reflect the artist’s early mornings, where she finds peaceful moments with her breakfast to peruse books of photographers who inspire her. These images explore imagined interactions, showing food and coffee carefully placed over the pages. I particularly enjoyed the casual way the pieces have been displayed in the exhibition, inspiring a relaxed approach to viewing them and encouraging fun for the viewer as they notice small details within each piece.
The work of Anastasia Samoylova is a skilled combination of composition, narrative and colour. ADAPTATION is an excellent showcase of this broad selection of artworks, inviting the viewer to explore the stories hidden in these beautiful photographs, finding more depth the longer they look.
ADAPTATION is showing at Saatchi Gallery until 20 January 2025.