The Girl with a Thousand Faces

WE’VE SEEN FLORA BORSI ON the pages of Professional Photo before, looking wistfully into the camera with an ice cream cone upside down on her head, for all the world as though nothing was out of place at all. It was one of our most striking covers of last summer, a typically tongue-in-cheek and manifestly surreal take on life from a young Hungarian artist who has been getting herself noticed in a big way through the originality of her vision and the seemingly effortless way she continually comes up with visual ideas that are striking, inventive and highly original.

Aged just 27, she’s already exhibited her work internationally, with solo shows in Europe and the USA, and she was also part of the prestigious ‘Continental Shift’ group exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London and has had her work shown at the Louvre in Paris. Big players have also been keen to be associated with her mercurial talent: her artwork was the face of Adobe Photoshop a few years back, while she’s also been collaborating with Hasselblad.

That’s a pretty impressive list of achievements but you definitely get the impression that Flora hasn’t really got properly started yet, and there’s a huge amount more to come. All the more surprising then to discover that she’s largely self-taught, even with regard to the Photoshop skills that underpin so much of the imagery she creates, and she also works alone, so there is no behind-the-scenes army of make-up artists and prop manufacturers helping her.