LONDON.- This summer, the Hay Hill Gallery brings a sense of the surreal to Cork Street and presents Big Scenes, the visionary and extraordinary world of award-winning photographer Marco Sanges.

Big Scenes combines photography, video and performance, bringing together larger than life characters and stories to play out a world of fantasy, grandeur and drama. Big Scenes is a dreamlike, decadent world reminiscent of Surrealism and the visual and performing arts of the glamorous golden age of the 1920s and 30s.

The artist Gavin Turk commented: “Marco Sanges’s art is like going to a theatre through different doors, characters in photos come to life in various forms of tableaux vivant”.

Sanges’s double award-winning short film Circumstances (Best Art Film – Portobello Film Festival, London 2008 and Best Experimental Art Video, Open Cinema, St Petersburg, Russia, 2009) will be screened in the lower ground floor gallery. A series of photographs from the accompanying book Circumstances will be shown alongside the film for the first time.

Sanges is attracted in particular to the luminous black and white films of the silent era and creates photographs in sequence that are narrative based, enigmatic and that evoke a feeling of mystery and the sense of a sensual, uncanny world just out of grasp. A magnification of imagination, the surrealistic nature of Big Scenes represents the liberation of the unconscious, as a means to create art outside the boundaries of official culture. This exhibition brings together the work of an artist who is passionate about life in its entirety and continues to evoke, transcend and excite the world.

Marco Sanges was born in Rome in 1970. He started work in a photographic studio near Rome. Fascinated by fashion, he became a photographer for Vogue Italia before moving to London, where he lives now. An imaginative and innovative photographer, he has exhibited worldwide. His clients include Vogue, The Sunday Telegraph, Trace, Elle, Creative Review and Dolce & Gabbana. His previous solo exhibitions include: Big Scenes, Hackney Empire, London (2010); Beyond Decadence, Arts Centre, Windsor (2010); Savile Row, B-Store, London (2006); Purity, Cobden Club, London (2004). Group exhibitions include: Take Home a Nude, Academy of Arts, New York (2009); British Art Fair, Royal College of Art, London (2008 and 2009); London Art Fair, Business Design Centre (2009); Art London, Royal Hospital, Chelsea (2008); and 20th Anniversary, Jonathan Cooper, London (2008). Awards include Best Art Film at the Portobello Film Festival 2008 and Open Cinema Film Festival 2009 (St. Petersburg, Russia) for the short Circumstances. His books include: Circumstances, Venus, Animal, and Erotic Photography.