43Lucia Fainzilber was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1986. She studied Costume Making Design for Theatre at Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, and Art Direction in Filmmaking at The University of Cine in Buenos Aires. After graduating in 2008, she worked as a colorist in post-production and color-correcting movies in a Visual Mastering Studio before moving to New York to study at the International Center of Photography. After finishing a One-Year Certificate Program at ICP, she assisted various fashion photographers based in NYC as well as doing her own editorial works for international magazines and campaigns for international and local brands. While working as a fashion photographer, she continued to develop her personal work. Since 2014, she has been represented by Praxis Art Gallery in NY and has participated in group shows in LA, Miami and London, as well as having her own solo shows “And Spring Again”, “Somewear” and “Wild Flowers”. In 2017, she participated in a group show during Paris Photo in France and received the First Prize at the International Fine Art Photography Awards from the Paris College of Art. In October 2018, she was part of the Barcelona Biennale of Photography and received the Bronze Prize from the Prix de la Photographie “Emerging artists photo prize” and an Honorable Mention at the International Photography Awards. In 2019, her series “Paradise” was exhibited in Gericke + Paffrath Gallery in Düsseldorf, Germany, and her last project “The Cookbook” was exhibited in Praxis Gallery in NYC. Most recently, her piece “Untitled #31” from the Series Somewear was selected to be auctioned at Phillips Auction House “Photography Auction” in London, UK, selling for more than the estimate. The voice she has developed as an artist allowed her to shoot commercial works for clients like Daily Harvest, My Ceremonia, Revlon, Adidas, and many more, making the commercial and the artistic world converge.
SOMEWEAR SERIES, 2014
Somewear is a series of self-portraits, which struggles with the idea of identity. Setting my body in front of the camera has been a way of looking at myself in another way, trying to answer all those questions about who we really are. Society, family and the generation we live in, make this journey even harder. We camouflage as animals or even soldiers do in order to survive. It’s our way of being inside a system. It’s like a game: if it fits, your vision can be deceived creating almost an optical illusion. Is it possible to isolate our purest self from everything that surrounds us? Somewhere we can find these answers or not. Maybe the real answer is to learn how to live with this but not forgetting to look inside.
WILD FLOWERS SERIES, 2016
Wild Flowers is a series of portraits of women and their obsessions. I pictured the female world as different species of flowers with their own particularities. The wildness is what gives each of them its own uniqueness and the enigmatic features these exotic species possess. Each woman belongs to a different kind of flower and this peculiarity is expressed not only in the visible features but also in their way of relating to femininity.
Obsessions are usually associated with disorders, persistent ideas and possessiveness, I want to break this relationship allowing ourselves to reconcile with our essence as something that belongs to us.
As a woman I am still curious about this universe, how we relate to each other and the peculiarity of each species. Although we may look familiar each of us holds a mystery in our own nature, color, structure and scent. Despite our special and unique features, we are all part of a beautiful garden, which represents the women’s world and our relationship through friendship, sisterhood and motherhood. I want to explore this universe where there is strength, care, love, protection, loyalty and admiration through my own obsession, which is color. I look at the world through color: as a pattern, as an emotion, as something that creates beauty. I chose red because it depicts sensuality, blood, life and love. But this red changes, evolves and progresses just like us. We live through cycles like seasons do, which allow us to constantly revolve and evolve, while experiencing contact with your bodies and passions. As a flower, we bloom and we fade, carrying our experience as the best slice of each petal.
THE COOKBOOK SERIES, 2019
In the intangible world of social media, food is regarded almost exclusively through its visual appearance, appreciated in highly elaborate photos that turn food into a fetish. Consumed only virtually by viewers, food remains in an imaginary state of deliciousness as an unrealizable desire. This digital presence implies a certain perspective of extraordinary privilege: having fulfilled its performance as a requirement for biological survival the question of food supply becomes a matter of entertainment.
The representation of food used to serve as figurative elements in still-life compositions. These decorative paintings were as meticulously staged as today’s posts, and anticipated the overhead shots that are now universal in the visual language of food of our digital times.
The Cookbook is an homage to the new visual hegemony that food carries in contemporary art: a trendsetting agent, an art form, the subject of food has even landed leading roles in television series and awarded it its own food porn and foodie hashtag. Each of these dishes in The Cookbook presents a different combination of ingredients, all of which co-exist in an attempt to create a harmonic feast for the eye. Food has historically been charged with cultural identity, which we symbolically ingest through its consumption. Cookbooks used to be family albums, instruction books written primarily for housewives to refer to their daily kitchen tasks. Nowadays, we challenge these traditional formats by breaking them down into data-rich components, employing stop-motion photography, recipe animation and bright illustrations to define the future and present state of the digital cooking instruction.
