Cristina Schek is the photosensitive kind. She thinks in pictures; her imagination is always in focus.
A Transylvanian Surrealist now rooted in London, Schek works primarily with photography and digital montage, creating conceptual images from her own photographic archive. Her work moves between the real and the imagined, exploring memory, perception, nature, transformation and the strange ways different things can belong together.
Art critic Estelle Lovatt FRSA has noted Schek’s departure from traditional representations of women, describing her work as a “new, unique visual language” and praising its ability to be “progressive and visionary”, “assertive, bold, self-assured, powerful and confident.” For Lovatt, Schek’s surrealistic imaginings shift the female figure away from the passive muse and towards something more self-determined: “the victor, not the victim.”
Self-taught in photography and far removed from traditional or documentary approaches, Schek treats the camera as a starting point rather than an end. Storytelling sits at the heart of her practice: layering, reassembling and transforming familiar fragments until another reality begins to appear.
Her images often begin in the real world and then wander somewhere else.