Yurian Quintanas Nobel

Yurian Quintanas Nobel [b.1983, NL] is a photographer based in Catalunya, Spain. His personal projects use photography to approach the intangible, the hidden side of life and its quiet mysteries, driven by a conviction that life is strange and that his images should hold onto that strangeness rather than explain it away.

For years he worked outward, going into the world to find the images it might offer him. More recently he has reversed the process, building his own world from a blank sheet, free of external rules or restrictions. He constructs his subjects from everyday objects and mundane materials, establishing a direct contact between creation and reality, between rationality and imagination.

His series The Ignorant Gardener draws on Constructivism, the Ready-Made and Surrealism. Combining sculpture and photography, Quintanas Nobel makes images that defy conventional logic and ask us to reconsider horticulture, one of the oldest trades in the world, and how little contemporary life now understands of it. Working on site, he builds temporary sculptures from the objects of the vegetable garden, the vegetables, tools and farming implements, grouped for their appearance rather than their function, with the garden itself as the backdrop. Each is photographed as a still life, then dismantled, every object returned to its place. The images take their titles from the language of gardening books and catalogues, given a surreal twist… READ MORE

Quintanas Nobel’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Three Shadows Photography Center in Beijing and Fotografiska in Shanghai (both 2024), the Benaki Museum for the Athens Photo Festival (2018) and Paris Photo (2014). He won the SFR Jeunes Talents award at Paris Photo in 2014, was selected as a LensCulture Emerging Talent in 2018, and received an OD Photo Prize Judges’ Pick in 2024. In 2023 his work was acquired by the National Photography Plan of the Government of Catalonia. He is the author of four monographs, most recently Dream Moons (Void, Athens, 2020).

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