SURREAL FASHION BY MISS ANIELA
"Miss Aniela’s photographs are both real and imagined... elaborate scenes that blur the boundaries between fine art and fashion"
- Jessica McQueen, Associate Curator at Saatchi Art
"There's no photographer who creates such surreal fashion photos as Miss Aniela"
- Alice Yoo, Founder of My Modern Met
For all global prints, work or other enquiries please contact: contact@missaniela.com
All the images seen on this website are produced and created by British artist Miss Aniela, real name Natalie Dybisz (b. 1986) who mixes art and fashion photography to create a fine balance of contemporary creativity. Her work centres on a fusion of traditional imagery and digitally enhanced motifs, interweaving in a surreal composition.
In Surreal Fashion, Miss Aniela depicts contemporary models with a reference to Renaissance and Dutch masters, shooting in stately home settings across Europe and US. Larger-than-life characters preside over a dreamlike tableaux of chandeliers, taxidermy and four-poster beds; motifs for another, utopic world of the past that we long to inhabit.
Miss Aniela's work has been exhibited by the Saatchi Gallery, House of Parliament, Waldermarsudde Museum Stockholm and Vogue Italia in Milan; and in numerous media including BBC, Daily Mail, Yahoo, El Pais and NY Arts.
MORE ABOUT THE COLLECTION
Surreal Fashion can be perceived as dream-like visual worlds with allusions to both couture photography and classical artworks, based on staged settings mainly in castles, that are subsequently digitally processed. The artist's detailed compositions, with their mixture of styles and evocative lighting, arouse associations to archaic palatial settings, Rococo Revival and is a form of contemporary commentary on the artistic expression found in salon paintings of the 18th century.
Many of the images notably feature elements from classical paintings including Adriaen van Utrecht, Melchior d'Hondecoeter and Otto Marseus van Schrieck; creatively and strategically combining modern with old, and birthing a new creation from paintstroke to pixel.
Dreamy characters bask in opulent worlds from the sublime to the bizarre. Zoo animals peer from French chateaus, a yellow tulle dress explodes into the canaries of Jean Baptiste Greuze, and painted ships of an English stately home dance upon the waves of a model's cascading skirts.
Miss Aniela has been working on the collection for over seven years, shooting extensively on location worldwide. The result is a visual feast crossing centuries of art history.
"The works of the British artist Miss Aniela (b. 1986) offer a contemporary commentary on salon painting. All of her works in this exhibition come from her photography series Surreal Fashion, which she started working on in 2011. Natalie's art photography is based on staged settings, mainly in castles, that are subsequently digitally processed. Her detailed compositions, with their mixture of styles and evocative lighting, come close to the form of artistic expression found in salon paintings, while a salon painter like Julius Kronberg used an illusionistic technique that resembled photography.
"Her works 'Migration Season' and 'Girl of Prey' can be perceived as dream-like visual worlds with allusions to both couture photography and older artworks. Viewed in this context, they arouse associations to 18th-century palatial settings and Rococo Revival, with the winged gods and goddesses of the classical world as well as creatures like centaurs, half man and half beast."
- Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde museum, Stockholm
Images from exhibition 'Salonsmalerie' and book picturing Surreal Fashion alongside salon works at Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde museum Sweden (17th Sep 2016 - 19 Jan 2017)
Surreal Fashion was invited to be part of Continental Shift exhibition, Saatchi Art’s first expose at the Saatchi Gallery in 2014.