Reconquista was Andrey Vrady's first solo exhibition in New York, presented at Sputnik Gallery in Chelsea, one of the city's leading contemporary art districts.
The exhibition introduced a series of large-scale photographic works that transformed ordinary urban environments into complex visual landscapes. Through digital reconstruction, familiar streets, buildings, traffic, and everyday architecture were reimagined as rhythmic compositions that balanced documentary observation with abstraction.
Rather than documenting reality, the works reconstructed it, revealing hidden structures and visual patterns embedded within the city.
Concept
The title Reconquista refers not to a historical event but to the idea of reclaiming visual perception.
Using photography as raw material, each image was repeatedly fragmented, mirrored, layered, and reconstructed until recognizable places evolved into entirely new visual environments. Architecture dissolved into ornament, movement became geometry, and everyday urban scenes transformed into intricate abstract compositions.
The project explored the tension between documentation and invention, asking how much of reality remains once an image has been fundamentally reconstructed.
Every artwork began with photographs taken in public space.
Instead of using photography as a final medium, the images became material for an extensive digital process involving repetition, symmetry, layering, and structural transformation. The resulting works blurred the boundary between photography, painting, and graphic composition while preserving traces of the original city beneath the abstract surface.
Exhibition
Presented at Sputnik Gallery in Chelsea, New York, the exhibition ran from December 3, 2009, through January 16, 2010.
The gallery presented a series of limited-edition archival pigment prints produced on museum-quality baryta paper.
Photography & Digital Image Manipulation
Andrey Vrady
Curated by Bogdan Mamonov
Sputnik Gallery
Chelsea, New York, USA
2009–2010
Solo Exhibition
Archival Pigment Prints
Limited Edition
“Mixing and modifying photographs, Andrey Vrady turns typical street scenes into fractal-like images expanded in new dimensions. Cruising cyclists, parked cars and passersby are enveloped in elaborate patterns, “reflecting both Western and Middle-Eastern aesthetic elements.” On Thursday, the interdisciplinary artist presents RECONQUISTA, an exhibition of these digitally modified works at Chelsea’s Sputnik Gallery.”
— Will Sherman
juliana & andrey vrady