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Concrete, 2022
von • by Mariyan Atanasov

Instagram: mariyanatanasov

Mariyan Atanasov is a Bulgarian photographer who gained no-

toriety in 2019 with his image montage Urban Tetris. This work,

in which he broke up the depicted buildings of his hometown

Sofia into puzzle-like individual parts and arranged them like in

the Tetris computer game, earned him a growing fan base on so-

cial media channels. Recently, a second part of this photo series

was followed by Concrete. Again, he shows the buildings without

their surroundings and once again he plays with the shapes and

structures of architecture – only this time much less flat (even if

there are axonometric representations among his “Tetris compo-

sitions”). Closer to the subject, the colour photographs gain both

in richness of detail and spatial complexity. Sometimes more,

sometimes less concrete than the ambiguous title initially sug-

gests, this time Atanasov shows concrete buildings in Tel Aviv.

Among them is the five-star Dan Hotel, built in the 1930s, the

façade of which was designed in rainbow colours by the Israeli

artist Yaacov Agam some 50 years later. Devoid of people and

without a visible ground, the photographer leaves the scale of

the architecture open and, with a clear sky as a background, the

boundary line at the edges of the building is declared to be the

horizon. The repetition of the same façade elements creates or-
namental compositions. Atanasov himself describes his work as

a captivating exploration and intense search for the contrasts of

different architectural elements in colour, form and materiality.

In an abstract yet honest way, he interprets the complexity of ar-

chitecture through his lens. In doing so, he creates an extraordi-

nary connection with each image between the abstract forms

and the real buildings they represent.