Anonymous icons – art about fleeting images

With a hand-picked selection of artworks, the Spazio57 Gallery invites visitors to free themselves from the fast pace of everyday life and, with the help of art, to reflect and consciously engage with the emotions evoked. In the exhibition A Change of Time, 28 artists from 18 countries – mainly from Europe, but also from the USA, Argentina, Japan and Australia – present their works, which open up new perspectives for visitors. The exhibition, in which Elvira Flamm from the Art.Salon artist program is also taking part, can be seen in Naples from 7 to 21 June. It was curated by Nartwork APS, a network of international artists.

Elvira Flamm is showing a current work from her series Icons without names, which was started in 2022 and now comprises more than 100 works. They are based on media images that provide information about conditions around the world but are quickly forgotten. Flamm depicts these images as if pixelated to illustrate the fact that people whose faces can be seen in the media worldwide nevertheless remain anonymous and are not perceived as individuals. »What is the reality behind these media photos of people who only serve as a symbol but remain completely unnoticed and anonymous as a person? For me, pixels as an expression of anonymity and the fragmentary are one step closer to the reality of this flood of media photos«, says the artist about her series of works.

In her extensive oeuvre, the artist Elvira Flamm repeatedly explores various levels of meaning of the seemingly ordinary and everyday. She chooses her medium depending on the theme of the work, be it watercolor or acrylic painting or experimental approaches with unusual materials such as leaves in collage-like works or texts integrated into paintings. Flamm's creative process does not follow a fixed structure: some works are strictly conceptual, others are created spontaneously. The artist studied painting at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Her life experiences in Suriname, where she lived for 16 years, have a particular influence on her work.