Artists: Claudio Abate, Aurelio Amendola, Gabriele Basilico, Sandro Becchetti, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Elisabetta Catalano, Giorgio Colombo, Mario Cresci, Mario Dondero, Federico Garolla, Luigi Ghirri, Mario Giacomelli, Gianfranco Gorgoni, Mimmo Jodice, Nanda Lanfranco, Uliano Lucas, Attilio Maranzano, Nino Migliori, Ugo Mulas, Paolo Mussat Sartor, Paolo Pellion, Ferdinando Scianna.
The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation presents United Artists of Italy, a project by Massimo Minini. The gallerist has assembled a collection of portraits of artists taken by some of the most significant Italian photographers. The idea was to conceive a collection of artists’ faces captured by great Italian photographers, as if one world were helping the other, complementing one another.
The project, begun out of passion a few years ago, has grown steadily thanks to direct contact with photographers who embraced the proposal, and has revealed itself as a true journey into photography, through archives and boxes, film and files. While at the outset the idea was to select exclusively portraits of artists, over time the focus expanded to include some portraits of foreign artists who are nevertheless very close to Italy, such as Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt; faces of writers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia; as well as artists caught at work, in their studios or in moments of leisure, and some of the most important gallerists, including Lucio Amelio and Leo Castelli.
This collection creates a history of the contemporary not through works, but through faces, manners, and attitudes. If the contemporary can be considered an attitude—a way in which a work positions itself in its own time and in communion with the major issues of the moment—the highest degree of tension with the contemporary is achieved not through the body of the work, but through that of the author, who lives in their own time, interprets it, gives it a voice, and founds it, defining its spatial and temporal contours.
The exhibition aims to offer a cross-section of Italian photography of recent decades, demonstrating the extraordinary capacity of great photographers to interpret and pay homage to great artists. It is not a simple chronological collection of images, but a narrative in which the same artist—seen, read, and interpreted by different photographers—reveals different facets of their destiny. Photography often says more than the author intends.
Through nearly two hundred and fifty shots, the work of twenty-two photographers active since the 1960s is presented.
Other venues:
Musée d'Art Moderne, Saint Étienne
7 May - 21 September2008
Palais des Beaux Arts, Bruxelles
20 March - 17 May 2009
Fondazione Stelline, Milan
24 September- 2009 - 31 January 2020
Biennale di Fotografia, Amsterdam
22 June - 4 September 2011
Estorick Collection, London
22 June - 4 September 2011
