Annalaura Tamburrini

First and foremost is blue. The deep, inscrutable blue of the sea; the mottled, textured blue of the cyanotype. In her powerful works on paper, Annalaura Tamburrini (Fasano, 1994) draws on the evocative power of this color to explore themes of departure and return, memory and identity, and a primal peace that liberates the body and mind. It all began with a series of photographs of people diving off the Apulian coast—places from her childhood to which the artist returns every summer after her studies and work have kept her away.

Here, the pace slows down, silence realigns her thoughts, and the sea draws her in like a primordial liquid where she can rediscover her origins. Relying on analog photography and traditional printing techniques—in particular cyanotype, which she studied for five years at the Officine Fotografiche school in Rome—Tamburrini presents an intimate and suspended body of work, where the manual application of the photosensitive emulsion onto large sheets of cotton paper lends an additional tactile and painterly dimension, making each print a unique work of art.

Text by Manuela Brevi