TORINO – Intesa Sanpaolo has opened to the public, starting yesterday and until January 6, 2025the exhibition at the Gallerie d’Italia – Turin Antonio Biasiucci. Ark edited by Roberto Koch. Third chapter of the project “La Grande Fotografia Italiana”, launched in 2022 with the exhibition by Lisetta Carmi and continued in 2023 with Mimmo Jodice to pay homage to the great masters of twentieth-century photography in our country.
The exhibition is organized under the patronage of the Piedmont Region and the City of Turin and represents one of the most important exhibitions dedicated to the photographer, covering a very broad period of his production.
Among the most interesting and innovative contemporary masters of our time, Antonio Biasiucci (Dragoni, 1961) has been pursuing for many years a practice that is inspired by an absolute version of language. A complex work, not simple but precise and punctual that simplifies, perhaps even strips down, the photographic gesture in a continuous renewal of forms in search of absolute symbols.
In this exhibition, with over 250 photographs on displayfor the first time the different chapters of Biasiucci’s “utopian poem” are presented together: between powerful polyptychs, sequences of images, single works, the effort is to create a poetic and extended representation of the life of human beings, in a journey that touches on the profound themes of existence, the essential elements of living always starting from personal experience and, therefore, from the autobiographical elements that first formed the character and sensitivity of the artist himself.
Michele Coppola, Executive Director of Art, Culture and Historic Heritage at Intesa Sanpaolo, states: “In the work of the Gallerie d’Italia, which tells the different ways in which photography expresses content and beauty, an in-depth look at the great Italian masters is essential. The exhibition curated by Roberto Koch is dedicated to them and today reaches its third installation and brings to the city one of the most evocative interpreters of contemporary photography in our country, Antonio Biasiucci.
In the coming months, alongside Mittermeier’s reportages, “Arca” will embellish the exhibition offer of the museum in Piazza San Carlo thanks to memorable installations by the Campanian artist. Once again the Gallerie d’Italia share an initiative of high artistic quality and cultural value, helping to affirm Turin’s identity as the first Italian city of photography.”
Biasiucci’s research adapts to great ancestral themes, such as knowledge, the basis of nutrition or the starry sky. Thus, the volumes of the archive of the Banco di Napoli that we find in the Codex series, become, decontextualized, architectural elements, bases for new, possible constructions. And the loaves of bread captured in the daily work of the hands appear as planets in the universe, meteorites that appear and disappear in the sky. But the artist also applies this same gaze to highly topical contents, such as the drama of migrants, which inspired the series The dream.
The deep black in which everything is often wrapped in Biasiucci’s photographs requires a special effort from the viewer, that of letting oneself be carried away by amazement in order to live and recognize the primordial flash, the source, the origin of life that we recognize in forms that reveal themselves dynamically in transformation. Everything has to do with something essential, like the Ark that contains archetypes or like the pyramid, the utopian construction made of many possible pieces, of an effort and a dream of the absolute.
The “La Grande Fotografia Italiana” project foresees that for each exhibition there will be the intervention of another artist. And so on the three monoliths that occupy the central space of the exhibition, among the loaves, skulls and casts of Biasiucci, here are the unexpected appearances of Mimmo Paladino. His primitive drawings, his numbers engraved in the black ink, in an intimate dialogue with the photographs, are imaginative forms and in their infinite and anonymous being they speak to us of the multiplicity of human beings.
Gallerie d’Italia – Torino offers the public a different way to immerse themselves in the exhibition path with the desire to innovate the visit experience through the Gallerie d’Italia app: building shared imaginaries, changing the narrative register, broadening one’s point of view by listening to the artist’s voice, is an opportunity that is offered to all the people who will visit the exhibition. Virtually engaging in direct dialogue with the author and his poetics, in fact, opens up to the magic of a story in which one listens and allows one to see more deeply.
The exhibition catalogue is produced by Edizioni Gallerie d’Italia | Skira.
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