Among the exhibitions in Italy in 2022, here are five absolutely unmissable ones, from north to south.
Luigi Ghirri and Modena a journey back at FMAV – Palazzo Santa Margherita until November 20
FMAV Fondazione Modena Arti Visive at FMAV Palazzo Santa Margherita presents the exhibition Luigi Ghirri and Modena. A journey back, which is part of the events celebrating the great photographer 30 years after his passing. Luigi Ghirri and Modena retraces the photographer’s work with over sixty photographs from the collection of the Galleria Civica del Comune di Modena and the photography collection of the Fondazione di Modena, both managed by FMAV.
The exhibition offers a chronologically reversed path starting from photographs from the second half of the 1980s to some extraordinary vintage prints from his early period, between 1970 and 1973. Other important sections focus on images dedicated to the historic center of Modena.
Also on display are volumes, photographs, and archival documents, some of which have never been shown to the public, that testify to Ghirri’s cultural journey and the decisive importance of his work in Modena for the culture of photography in Italy.
Massimo Bartolini Hagoromo at the Centro Pecci until January 8
With Massimo Bartolini Hagoromo, the Centro Pecci in Prato dedicates an important exhibition to the Italian artist.
Massimo Bartolini Hagoromo presents a new installation specifically designed for the museum’s spaces that guides the viewer to discover works from different moments of his career.
Hagoromo refers to the title of a well-known piece of Japanese Noh theater but also the title of what Bartolini considers his first mature work: inside his old studio, on a lit stage, a musician improvises music for saxophone. A dancer reacts to the music, moving inside a parallelepiped on wheels, resembling a tiny living unit.
From this performance, one can already grasp some of the themes and characteristics that still accompany his research today, such as the narrative dimension, which develops from tributes, references, and borrowings from other stories, works, and biographies; the relationship with architectural and spatial dimensions; the connection with theatrical and performative aspects, also through the use of sound and music; the delineation within.
SENSORAMA The gaze, the things, the deceptions at MAN – Museo Provinciale di Nuoro until October 30
SENSORAMA The gaze, the things, the deceptions at the MAN – Museo Provinciale di Nuoro adopts the model of the Museum of Illusions with the aim of showcasing the complexity of cognitive phenomena and the “pleasure” of being deceived.
The title of the exhibition SENSORAMA is inspired by the name of a machine designed in 1957 by American director Morton Heilig to test synesthetic experiences in his experiential cinema, in order to amplify impressions, not only auditory with stereo sound but also tactile, dynamic, and olfactory.
To look again, to train the eyes, and to question the truth and not just the vision is the purpose of SENSORAMA, which, drawing inspiration from the fathers of illusion such as René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, opens the spectrum to more recent aesthetic inquiries regarding perception and authenticity.
Isgrò erases Brixia at the Museo di Santa Giulia until January 8
Emilio Isgrò returns to Brescia with a new large and original project that, until January 8, 2023, will involve the most important cultural sites of Brescia: from the Museo di Santa Giulia to the Capitolium, from the Roman Theatre to the Renaissance Cloister, to the gardens of the Viridarium.
The exhibition Isgrò erases Brixia aims to emphasize the dialogue that is established between archaeology and contemporary art, between history and the present, between classical culture and its persistence in our time with works, all of environmental dimensions, specifically conceived and created by the artist for this occasion, in close dialogue with the evocative spaces that host them.
The complex of the Museo di Santa Giulia will host three more episodes of the exhibition project and will feature a new cycle of paintings titled Brixia as Athens. Thirteen large canvases where the illustrated pages of a book on the daily life of an ancient Greek polis have been erased in white.
Carlo Valsecchi Bellum at the Collezione Maramotti until December 31
Collezione Maramotti presents Carlo Valsecchi Bellum, a new artistic project commissioned to Carlo Valsecchi.
Bellum narrates the conflict between man and nature and between man and man. The use of nature as a defense against the other man and likewise the defense of man from nature. With the mountain as its symbolic representation – an extreme natural expression and at the same time the place of the last positional war – the project originates from an exploration of the territories and fortified constructions of northeastern Italy related to the First World War, one of the last moments in the history of Western humanity where the fate and experience of man were closely connected to the natural environment, its conformation, its laws, and its control.
Through a work lasting about three years, Valsecchi traversed those mountains with his optical bench, from winter to spring he listened to those places to gaze into the abyss of a blind conflict, sublimating in his shots a raw reality in often abstract form, intimately aesthetic and absolute in its essence. The images of Bellum become glimpses, portals made of light and composition, suspended in a timeless space between silence, isolation, and waiting.
