Ugo Mulas, The Photography Rooms and the inexhaustible magic of Venice
The island (an enchanted 1) of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, where by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini is found, overlooks the iconic view of the Laguna and Piazza San Marco and is at present internet hosting an exhibition committed to just one of the most influential authors not only in Italian pictures. The exhibition Ugo Mulas. L’operazione fotografica (Ugo Mulas. The photographic procedure) is a challenge that coincides with the 50th anniversary of the author’s loss of life.
This is an option not to be missed mainly because, with all around 300 visuals, such as 30 shots by no means exhibited ahead of (such as the unpublished portraits of Giorgio De Chirico, Maria Callas and Joan Mirò), files, guides and movies, it delivers a synthesis that opens up to the unique ordeals Ugo Mulas confronted, enabling a world-wide (and scarce) vision of his get the job done. He utilized to be an eclectic author who labored in a lot of parts of images and, at the identical time, managed to analyse in depth the principle of images. In fact, the exhibition itinerary – or instead, the several attainable paths – in the Sale del Convitto in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, has 14 sections covering all of Mulas’s fields of curiosity, vital to render the complexity of his function, which ranges from portraits of mates and personalities from literature, cinema and architecture to theatre, marketplace and fashion.
Mulas’s photographic strategy can’t be connected to a genre. His do the job discounts with “experiments in essential thoughts” on photography, which he analyzed and tried out to demonstrate. And the title of the exhibition, as perfectly as its plan, is impressed by his most conceptual collection, Le Verifiche (The Verifications), notably from the title of the second of them: L’operazione fotografica, devoted to Lee Friedlander. It is a mirror shot, in which Mulas photographed himself protected by the digital camera, appearing unidentifiable and possibly accepting the notion that behind the camera there is a photographer and not just an impartial observer.
His frame of mind also gave rise to his pics of landscapes and towns, of the Venice Biennale (which he photographed from 1954 to 1972) with Pop Artwork artists, together with Alexander Calder, Christo and George Segal. In the 1964 version, U.S. Pop Artwork was introduced to the European community. Many thanks to the collaboration of the critic Alan Solomon and the art seller Leo Castelli, Mulas was introduced to the American artwork scene through his initially vacation to the United States, in which he portrayed properly-identified painters at get the job done, like Frank Stella, Johns, Rauschenberg, but also Andy Warhol and John Cage. In 1967, his assessment of functioning with artists was revealed in the quantity New York: Artwork and Persons.
There are also photos of L’Attesa (in which he managed to doc Lucio Fontana’s mental instinct of Il Taglio) and of Milan. Mulas made his debut in Milan, with his reportages that pictured suburbs and dormitories, but also the innovative earth that fulfilled at the tables of the Jamaica. «The Jamaica» – as curator Denis Curti observes – «used to be the put for meetings, for near friendships, these with Mario Dondero, Piero Manzoni, Alfa Castaldi, Pietro Consagra, Carlo Bavagnoli and Antonia Bongiorno, who would come to be his wife. The itinerary contains “the most considerable ‘series’ for Mulas himself, those focused to Calder and Duchamp and the fundamental The Verifications (1968-1972), which are viewed as one of the most interesting “experiments in crucial thought” on photography”, Curti provides.
The exhibition is an opportunity to see “in real” Le Verifiche, a collection of thirteen photographic will work by way of which Mulas issues images, furnishing a official and conceptual analysis of it. Le Verifiche represent a topical position in the historical past of images, a “meta photographic” analysis that has by no means ceased to prompt issues about the purpose of the photographic picture. It’s a vision that stays a going concern. In truth, in our time, as the emergence of new technologies is top to an aesthetic revolution, it is time to mirror on the position of digital photography in modifying the way we live and connect.
Mulas utilized to publish in journals this sort of as Rivista Pirelli, Domus and Vogue. He also created an artistic collaboration with Giorgio Strehler, which resulted in his picture reports L’opera da tre soldi [The Threepenny Opera] (1961) and Schweyck nella seconda guerra mondiale [Schweyck in the Second World War] (1962).
“The photographic work of Ugo Mulas” – Alberto Salvadori, director of the Archivio Mulas and co-curator of the exhibition, says– presents an indispensable point of view on the position of the perform of art itself, which prompts us to replicate on the partnership, just about every time new and unique, between the artist and his workspace, inspiration and the context that expresses it. The retrospective, that inaugurates Le Stanze della Fotografia accounts for this ever-present «actuality» of Mulas’ gaze, also showing less recognized facets of it as a result of snapshots and archive documents in no way exhibited before”
The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue revealed by Marsilio Arte.
New areas for photography: an island for the graphic
A few months ago, a new exhibition and analysis centre, Le Stanze della Fotografia (The Images Rooms), opened on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice inside the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, in the Sale del Convitto (with an exhibition space of 1850 sq. metres). It is a joint initiative by Marsilio Arte and Fondazione Giorgio Cini, meant to move additional together the route started in 2012 at La Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice.
The association among photography and the island of San Giorgio is a organic just one. Without a doubt, «major consideration has generally been devoted by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini to pictures, the two as an artwork type and as historical-artistic documentation, building, at the instigation of Vittorio Cini himself, what currently is one of the most in depth picture libraries in Italy and Europe», Giovanni Bazoli, president of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini clarifies. It shops nearly a million photos, freely consultable by appointment or on line) and it is specialised within just the sphere of historical creative study, with collections that belonged to artwork historians, journalists and writers and from the relations present above many years concerning Vittorio Cini, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and the Alinari corporation.
Conceived as an global centre for study and appreciation of photography and the tradition of images, Le Stanze della Fotografia will give, along with exhibitions, laboratories, meetings, workshops, seminars with nationwide and international photographers.
Exploration and exhibition actions are coordinated by the complex-scientific committee chaired by Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Institute of History of Artwork of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, and composed of Emanuela Bassetti, president of Marsilio Arte, Chiara Casarin, head of cultural growth and conversation for the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, inventive director Denis Curti and Luca De Michelis, taking care of director of Marsilio Arte.
Paola Sammartano
Ugo Mulas. The Photographic Procedure
29 March – 6 August 2023
Le Stanze della Fotografia
Island of San Giorgio Maggiore
30124 Venice, Italy
www.lestanzedellafotografia.it
