Seventy years of career told through 200 images. Udine pays homage to one of the masters of Italian photography, Gianni Berengo Gardin, 94 years old, with an exhibition that will be inaugurated on 18 May (in his presence) in the Parliament Hall and the rooms of the Ancient Art Gallery of the Castle of Udine .
At the exhibition “Gianni Berengo Gardin – The eye as a profession” 192 shots by the Ligurian photographer will be exhibited, a complete collection of original vintage prints from his personal archive and from Maxxi in Rome, which organized the event in collaboration with Contrasto and the Civic Museums of Udine.
After the stops in Rome and Naples, the gaze of the master of black and white arrives in Friuli. The exhibition, curated by Margherita Guccione of Maxxi and Alessandra Mauro of Contrasto, is imagined as a sort of journey, a chronological, topological and thematic journey in Berengo Gardin’s way of seeing and photographing Italy which traces the photographer’s career through the photographs taken in the cities that most marked his private and professional life, which also highlight the centrality of man and his place in a social space.
«Photography as documentation of reality» underlined Margherita Guccione. «Document but also an eye that interprets situations» echoed Alessandra Mauro, yesterday at the presentation of the exhibition which took place at the headquarters of the Friuli Foundation.
A journey then. The starting point is Venice, where Berengo Gardin approached photography for the first time. Venice is the place where he trained as a photographer, and it is the place of a continuous return, from the first images of the 1950s in which an intimate and placid city can be seen to his most recent project, from 2013, dedicated to the Great Ships. From the Venetian lagoon we move on to the Milan of industry, workers’ struggles, intellectuals (on display, among others, the portraits of Ettore Sotsass, Gio Ponti, Ugo Mulas and Dario Fo), and we travel through almost all the regions and Italian cities, from Sicily to the Piedmontese rice fields, observed in their social, cultural and landscape transformations from the Second World War to today.
And in this scenario Friuli Venezia Giulia also plays its part. Among the shots also the Monfalcone shipyards and the prints that tell the story of psychiatric hospitals: these are, as the organizers underlined, «images of denunciation and respect, extraordinary and terrible, in the background of which the psychiatric hospital can also be seen of Gorizia, which documented for the first time the conditions within various institutions throughout Italy, 10 years before the Basaglia law which closed them”.
As highlighted by Silvia Bianco, Civici Musei, director of the Friulian Museum of Photography, the exhibition can be visited in the Parliament Hall: visitors will simply need to purchase the entrance ticket to the Castle or the single ticket for the Civic Museums, which will also give access to the other museum spaces of the Castle at the Casa Cavazzini exhibitions and at the Ethnographic Museum of Friuli, during the usual opening hours to the public: from Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm. To complete the itinerary, over 200 of the photographer’s publications will be on display.
«We are working hard – highlighted the municipal councilor for Culture, Federico Pirone – to make Udine a small but big laboratory within Europe in which culture is a central infrastructure capable of stimulating discussion, reflection, dialogue and sustainable growth. Photography, especially that of great performers, is never looked back in time but inside us and helps us look at the time we are living in differently.”
All information on the exhibition and guided tours is available on the website www.civicimuseiudine.it and on the social channels of the Civic Museums.
