With this month bringing Photo London to the capital, many householders will be thinking about having an artistic photographic image hung up at home.
If you should do so, we offer picture framing in Hackney that is just as suited to a photograph as it is to a painting or drawing, providing you with a stylish frame that will bring the best out of the image within.
There are many different options for having a photographic print on your wall. It may be an arty black and white, it may be saturated with colour enhancement, or it might have certain colours selectively enhanced, maybe with a red or a blue against a black and white background (this is sometimes done in moving pictures too – think of the girl in the red dress in Schindler’s List).
All these are options offered by various contemporary artists, but if you want something a bit different, an artist like Zoobs Ansari may be just the one to check out.
Zoobs Ansari is the moniker of the artist whose real name is Zoran Zarre, who has avoided the pseudonymous approach of Banksy. His works range across a multimedia kaleidoscope ranging from bright colours to black and white, from still pictures to old movie-style productions.
Among the works he has undertaken are simple black and white photographic works, such as the images he was commissioned to take of singer Cher during her ‘Here We Go Again’ tour at the O2 in London.
Others include more funky productions such as his early 2020 (it couldn’t be any other time in 2020, after all) exhibition of ‘Dead Heroes’ at Concept on the King’s Road, featuring the likes of John Lennon. These were more colourful, based on original photographs but with psychedelic backgrounds.
The work of Zoobs is not just about variety, however. He asks some serious questions in his art, with examples being another early 2020 exhibition titled Insanity Fair.
It deals with the obsession with celebrity engendered by 24-hour media, linked to the infamous prophecy by Andy Warhol in the 1960s that “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”. Like Warhol, the idea is to explore the disconnection between the way fame makes some seem untouchable, and yet more exposed.
All that might sound like a deep concept to extract from a single image, but that is the aim of the most thoughtful art.
However, Zoobs is not above a little sojourn down a populist and irreverent route. In 2011, he produced a picture called ‘God Save the Future Queen’, which was displayed at the Opera Gallery in London before being sold. Displayed to coincide with her marriage to Prince William, it depicted Kate Middleton in the style of the cover for the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen.
While Kate is now a step closer to acquiring that status at the next coronation, it is quite possible the new monarch could be the subject of some of Zoob’s works in the next few years. However, the sheer variety of his work means that if that is not of interest, you should easily be able to find something else he has produced that most certainly is.