The exhibition 'Luigi Ghirri: The Impossible Landscape' in the Matthew Marks Gallery presents you 34 vintage color photographs, which were created between 1970 and 1989, with landscapes Rome Italy where the artist was born and spent the majority of his life, plus landscapes from Austria and France.
The title of the exhibition refers to the artist's statement from 1989 on the way photos “become our impossible landscape “become our impossible landscape, without scale, without a geographic order to orient us; a tangle of monuments, lights, thoughts, objects, moments, analogies from our landscape of the mind, which we seek out, even unconsciously, every time we look out a window, into the openness of the outside world, as if they were the points of an imaginary compass that indicates a possible direction.” From the very beginning of his career, Ghirri used his camera turn the seemingly familiar into something else, something strange.
“A 1973–75 photograph from Modena, for example, shows a building facade illuminated by warm sunshine. Only on close inspection does it reveal itself to be a reflection in a puddle. The rich color of this image was unusual for early-1970s art photography, which was still almost exclusively black and white. Ghirri’s pioneering use of color was just one way he grounded his imagery in the visual language of everyday reality.” the Galerie on his photographic approach.
And explains: “Early in his career Ghirri worked as a land surveyor, and later he would use topographic metaphors, like “imprecise cartography” and “sentimental geography,” to describe his art. Much of his work examines this disjunction between the world and its depictions. But his photography is also rooted in a deep fondness for his homeland."
About his Paessagio Italiano (Italian Landscape) photographs, Ghirri wrote: “I have viewed these places with a gaze full of affection and love, in an attempt to perceive a simple and astonished feeling of belonging.”
Genevieve Allison, Rights Coordinator, MoMA and Editor at New York Photography Diary, on the artist: “How do small, quiet images of idiosyncratic subjects and their strange textures – torn advertisements, tile arrangements, eccentrically manicured plants, and panes of blue sky – have the power to speak about the construction of memory? This is the enigma at the heart of Luigi Ghirri’s vernacular-style photographs taken predominantly in his home region of Emilia-Romagna, Italy, in the 1970s and ’80s. Informed by an earlier career in landscape surveying, where he learned to codify the emotional and associative sensations of unremarkable surroundings, Ghirri approached landscape photography with a pioneering conceptualism drawn together with affection for his northern Italian milieu. In his 1989 essay “The Impossible Landscape”, after which this show is titled (and anthologized in the recent book Luigi Ghirri: The Complete Essays 1973–1991), the artist suggests that when we are presented with the image of a place – even the sequential, banal elements of our everyday environment – our personal histories show up to complete the picture. The warm quality of Ghirri’s vintage chromogenic and cibachrome prints are documents of a time when color was only just becoming an expressive consideration in photography and amateur work, evolving out of a postwar snapshot generation. Ghirri, alongside other pioneers of color, shifted the way the photograph engaged the modern, everyday world”.
About - Born in 1942, Luigi Ghirri spent his working life in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. Although he exhibited extensively during his lifetime, his work did not receive international recognition until after his untimely death in 1992. In 2008, Aperture published the first English-language monograph on Ghirri, and his work was featured at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and 2013. Since 2012 he has had exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, and the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. A major European touring retrospective is scheduled to open in 2018.
Luigi Ghirri - The Impossible Landscape . through April 30, 2016 . Matthew Marks Gallery, 526 West 22th Street, New York . matthewmarks.com