Sven Marquardt pres. Disturbing Beauty

Demand Artists & Metropolis are presenting

DISTURBING BEAUTY by Sven Marquardt for the first time in Sofia on March 8th. 

Special guests are the Berghain dj, Freddy K and the Italian dj Matisa, who will join the Bulgarian talents DJ Steven and Ziggy.

Music and visual installations will merge into a unified, multi-sensory experience.

The people portrayed by Sven Marquardt are not chosen randomly, but are carefully selected from the artist's circle of friends, colleagues and acquaintances.

In Sven’s own words, “For more than thirty years, club- and subculture have determined both my life—as a curator of countless nights—and, of course, my life as a photographer. In a city in transition after the wild eighties and the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had for the first time put my camera aside. It was at the end of the 1990s that my camera again became a stylistic device for expressing our attitude towards life. Berlin has always been the setting as well as the inspiration for my pictures and projects.“

Born in East Berlin in 1962, Sven Marquardt was a formative part of the emerging Punk, New Wave and artists' scenes of Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg from the mid 1980s. When the Berlin Wall came down, he took an out-time from photography and immersed himself in Berlin's newly developing club scene. Since the late 1990s, with his job as a doorman for the club Ostgut, he has been fascinated with the theme of ‚night.’ Sven went on to become the nightlife icon when Berghain opened in 2004. Inspired by the cultural atmosphere of Berlin, Sven returned to photography in the late 1990s with his exhibitions traveling the world.

Since 2015 Sven Marquardt showed his photographic work in various exhibitions, including Berlin, Belgrade, Sydney, New York City, Istanbul and Montreal, followed numerous invitations by the German Goethe Institut, lives in residences and works for magazines like i-D, Interview, Numéro Berlin, SLEEK, Der Spiegel, Vogue and ZOO as well as for fashion labels such as Hugo BOSS, Levi’s, ITEM m6, Baldessarini, Liebeskind, G-Star and 44 LABEL GROUP. Starting in 2015 he has been teaching as a lecturer at the OSTKREUZ School of Photography and in 2019 as guest lecturer at the Polimoda, International Institute for Fashion Design and Marketing, Florence. 

Music by: @freddyk3614 @matisa.dj 

@djsteven @ziggy

Digital Creator: @tavy_h

Motion design: @tilius.xyz

@svenmarquardt

assistant: @streetmoments.nyc