Kurt Stallaert is a Belgium-based art director and contemporary artist. As a fashion and advertising photographer he developed a personal style with impactful images that inspired many brands around the world. His continuous search for authentic and strong imagery in his professional work naturally led him to venture into artistic photography where he most recently discovered a love for video and film.

In 2008 Kurt surprised the Belgian art scene with Bodybuilders' World (2007-2012), a remarkable photo series of appealing images that seduce and threaten at the same time: muscled men, women and children in an imaginary world. For this series Kurt travelled around the globe, not only to find potential bodybuilders, but also to capture the best and most authentic settings. His first collection of photographs was realized in Brussels and Prague. It was then, in 2010, that Kurt travelled to Africa to continue working on the series with African bodybuilders. Bodybuilders' World was quickly picked up amongst galleries, online art magazines, private collectors, and museums in Belgium and abroad. Later in 2010, a selection of his bodybuilders work was exhibited in The Weight Body at the renowned Museum Dr. Guislain in Ghent and the famous Ghent Art Fair. More exhibitions and shows followed soon after.

Further exploring the boundaries between the real and the surreal in photography, Stallaert soon began to discover the possibilities of moving pictures. In 2012 he began experimenting with high-speed photography, creating what he now calls moving stills: slow motion images that cross the lines between photography and film. At a glance, we might think of these images as framed photos or video stills. It is only when we look closer and more carefully that we discover a picture moving in slow motion. With a dramatic tension between beauty and suspense, Kurt Stallaert's moving stills invite us to look, and look again, as if there is something about to happen. Or has it already happened?

Stallaert evokes tangible expression and emotion in both his photography and video work stemming from a sensitivity to metamorphosis in the human body, and the deceleration of time and space. His artistic endeavors take us into a modern mythology of a dreamy, imaginary universe that seems familiar, yet entirely inexistent. Balancing between reality and surreality, these images intimidate, inspire, threaten and seduce, leaving us craving more. In his latest works, Kurt Stallaert hopes to cross the borders of imagination and go beyond simple aesthetics to make everyday experiences exceptional.

For his first international solo exhibition, Kurt Stallaert brings the best of his personal work to the Bratislava City Gallery. Within the walls of this historical building, the exhibition hall has been redesigned into a museum on scale, allowing the spectator to discover his work in a slow motion modus. Opportunities to see the personal works of Kurt Stallaert do not come often, as the artist is quite modest and selective about where his works are displayed. Take a moment to experience the journey through a diary of pictures at this monumental exhibition of Kurt Stallaert’s early bodybuilders series as well as some of his most recent moving stills. Discover an invincible journey through the mind of the artist.

Curator's note: Kurt Stallaert´s moving stills is a unique approach to the image conceived through photography, created by combining aspects of both film and photography, though never quite settling as either. A high speed camera is used to create an extreme slow movement within a seemingly still picture, bringing the spectator the possibility of change inside a classically framed situation. Without the narrative of a movie or the stillness of a photo, Stallaert's moving stills is a fusion of two mediums with a focus on its key message - the picture.