Sofia, Bulgaria

In the work of Mariyan Atanasov, massive urban skyscrapers are deconstructed and reduced to their component parts, rendered as individual units floating in space, then flipped, bisected, and decontextualized against a flat background, highlighting the atomized nature of modern urban living and contemporary life as a whole.

These works offer a vision of reality busting apart at the seams, but the hidden corners revealed are curiously blank, empty flat surfaces that stubbornly refuse to hide or reveal. Nevertheless, these cubical housing units are friendly structures, highlighting the progressive streak in the architecture of Atanasov’s native Bulgaria. Atanasov works as a product designer and photographer in the capital city of Sofia, and his experiences as an urban professional surely inform his keen view of that contemporary landscape. Elsewhere in his body of work, his photography portrays curiously empty urban spaces, including a series of empty New York City basketball courts, which convey a peculiar sense of desolation in the vein of surrealist painter Giorgio De Chirico.