As a multiple internationally award-winning film director and photographic artist, Italian photographer Mayk Azzato combines photographic and cinematic modes of expression into a unique artistic language. The pop-up exhibition brings together portraits of international personalities with Azzato’s free artistic works, which, as a symbiosis between classical photography and digital possibilities, open up new perspectives on urban life.

These hybrid techniques show Azzato’s visual interpretations of places such as the deserts of Morocco, the skyline of New York, and the Hollywood Hills. His focus is on the unconventional, as the artist himself says about his work. While he masters the rules of photography, he also enjoys breaking them. Much like film sets, his large-format photographs evoke a cinematic atmosphere, and through their special presentation technique in floating frames, they gain an even more powerful radiance. The exhibited works were often created during Azzato’s film productions, partly on set itself, partly while traveling to the next filming location. Well-known personalities such as Kevin Costner, Seal, Brigitte Nielsen, and André 3000 of the music band Outkast have collaborated with Mayk Azzato on advertising campaigns and album covers.

A special role in the exhibition is taken by a series of images showing New York City’s urban landscape in the spring of 2001 – just a few weeks before September 11. These architectural photographs are calm and powerful, yet retrospectively one can read into them the gravity of what was to follow. The classic black-and-white works present the metropolis from a different angle than his more recent photographs, whose vibrant colors create a striking contrast.

For the exhibition, the artist also produced a short film with the Leica SL, which will be shown for the first time during the exhibition period in the gallery premises.

About the artist
Mayk Azzato, born in Italy and based in Frankfurt, first made a name for himself as a photographer and later also as a film director. He has shot numerous advertising campaigns and editorials for Vanity Fair, GQ, and Vogue, as well as countless album covers for international musicians.

His Frankfurt photo studio is tellingly located in a former cinema, for which he and his wife Francesca designed the furniture themselves. Azzato’s works have already been presented in Munich, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt.