CGD

At first sight, it may seem that the product images by Barbora Lundgren could not differ more than last year’s photographs for Burberry and those for Elle Decoration from the year before that. But her minimalist compositions of the decorative cosmetics by Burberry and her almost Mannerist still-lifes for the Czech versions of Elle Decoration and Vogue in fact share much in common. If the Mannerist still-lifes are based on the pre-modern belief in an analogous relationship between the macrocosmic and microcosmic worlds (and Lundgren, working in tandem with stylist Klára Tománková, indeed composed images for Elle and Vogue that are very similar to Mannerist-era allegorical cabinets containing curious materials, antiques and other items), her work for Burberry rather focused on the similarities between the photographed still-life and the company’s eyeshadow palette. The similarity is not in the shape, but rather in the color scheme. The tones of four various eggs and four shades of tea in the cups exactly correspond to the color palette of eye shadow inspired by the traditional colors of the British clothing brand.

And we can also find Mannerist approaches in other, at first sight minimalist, compositions by Barbora Lundgren as well as in the products they depict – this is the case of the power banks featured in the How to Spend It lifestyle magazine of the Financial Times. Not only do the five stacked power banks make for a fragile Mannerist still-life, their marbled surface is also reminiscent of a Baroque-era painting technique formerly used to evoke the optical illusion of a real marble surface. Together, the power banks create a phantasmagorical effect in which it is hard to distinguish between the organic and the inorganic, the living and non-living.

Karel Císař