Marlies Plank

Marlies Plank is a photographic artist and graphic designer whose work surveys the surreal, the dreamlike and the uncanny. Born in Vienna, she has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and North America at galleries including the Museum of Photography, Los Angeles ,Pavlovs Dog Gallery, Berlin and had her work presented at Billboards across L.A. Clients include Maison Valentino, Le Monde, Die Zeit, Seabourn Cruise Line and Harvard Business Review among others.

Plank amalgamates digital photography and post production techniques. Her vibrant works explore humanistic ideas, and often convey rich emotion through the superimposition of vibrant colours, patterns and designs over her photographs. This enables a considered survey of the overlap between real life and the dream state, as well as the emotions that the surreal is capable of conjuring up.

About her work, she shares, “Dream on is a visual storytelling series that started out as a creative outlet during the pandemic lockdown, bringing together a surreal experience through photography and digital painting techniques. The images are otherworldly, composing pink elephants in idyllic landscapes floating on clouds, through nature, but also placed in spaces of confinement.

Dream on exposes the absurdity of our reality in the everyday, but also the fantastical nature of where our minds lead us in isolated, stagnant periods. Playful and dream-like, these anthropomorphistic elephants remind the viewer of the exploratory nature of our minds. In a time of stagnation where travel and novelty experiences are limited, Dream on indulges in these desires. With child-like wonder and curiosity a universal story of escapism is created between the seams of physical reality and the imagination.”