This summer, Baden-Baden has gained another place for art lovers. Within walking distance of the Trinkhalle and the Festspielhaus is Sonja Bell’s new gallery, an art gallery for photographic art in limited editions.
We usually only know art galleries exclusively for photographic art from Switzerland, France, Italy, or the Benelux countries.
In Germany, this is a rarity. And so the Bell Gallery was created in a charming 1920s townhouse in Baden-Baden. A little jewel. True to the motto “Small but beautiful.”
The start went more than according to plan. The first artists were none other than Frank Kuhnert and the English photographer Elizabeth Joan Clarke in a duo exhibition.
It was to continue in quick succession. This was immediately followed on February 1st, 2025, by the vernissage of the Iranian photo artist Somy Samani with her staged self-portraits. An Iranian artist in a solo exhibition is certainly not an everyday occurrence and to be considered a small sensation under the current circumstances.
Somy Samani (*1988 Karaj/Iran) began her artistic work after completing a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in graphic design at Soore University/Tehran and Ferdowsi University/Mashhad.
Somy Samani’s skillful photography is combined with her extensive experience in make-up and styling. She found her personal style in the staging of introspective self-portraits, which deal in a profound way with female identity, her role as a woman in the cultural heritage of Persia, as well as with themes of personal transformation. Her minimalist, expressive works captivate with their extraordinary visuality and haunting complexity. Influenced by the political climate of Iran, her series of images are permeated with palpable melancholy and deep sensitivity.
Themes such as tenderness and violence, concealment and revelation, meaning and despair, but also beauty and injury, as well as existence and loss come to the fore again and again. However, never superficially striking but always highly poetic and sensitively encrypted. Samani’s imagery is clear and precise but leaves plenty of room for open interpretation and personal reading and touches with deep, mysterious emotionality.
Her works first gained international attention in 2023 as part of an exhibition in Budapest. However, they are now also very well received in Paris. Somy Samani is a real discovery as an outstanding representative of expressive photographic art.
She lives and works under interesting conditions in Tehran/Iran.
Awards:
PX3, Prix de la Photography Paris / TIFA, Tokyo International Foto Award / BIFA, Budapest International Foto Award, Motiva/Austria
The Somy Samani exhibition can be seen until May 3, 2025. Please see the gallery website for opening times.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Sonja Bell is a photographer and gallery owner in Baden-Baden, specializing in artistic and commercial photography with a focus on unique, limited-edition photographic art.
Horst Kistner, born in 1969 in Würzburg, studied photography at the Lette-Verein Berlin and worked professionally in advertising and food photography from 1988 to 2012. Since 2013, he has focused exclusively on artistic work and lives in Karlsruhe, Germany.
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