Untitled Limited Edition 3/15 Photograph

María Gimenez de Azcárate (Spain, 1987) is a professional photographer and visual artist based in Amsterdam. In her work, she experiments with analogue techniques and digital omission and blurs authentic documentary, surreal scenography and staged cinematography. Inspired by filmmakers and photographers such as Grete Stern, Agnès Varda and Nan Goldin she investigates existentialism and the non-linearity of time. Age, death, birth and the liminal stages of life’s constant transformations are recurring themes. Her pictures confront us with the complexity of the struggle for agency and independence, overshadowed by loneliness and our desire for the other. María’s work shows a relentless fascination for the beauty of vulnerability — as something sublime yet tucked away. Projecting the deep-seated emotional terrors of the everyday outwards, her pictures can cut deep, but do so quietly. Everything that is so estranging about them makes them oddly relatable. They remind us of the dreams that haunt us after waking and of those moments where memory and imagination merge in the depths of our psyche. María reveals and hides at the same time, as if playing hide and seek with our own wounds to make us discover that the essence of life lies in the simple inseparability and possible simultaneity of joy and hurt.