LUIGI GHIRRI – THE IMPOSSIBLE LANDSCAPE
2016-02-29The exhibition takes its title from his 1989 artist’s statement about the way photographs “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 beginning of his career, Ghirri used his camera to render the familiar 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.
Opposite – Corsica, 1976
Exhibition runs through till April 30th, 2016
Matthew Marks
523 West 24 Street
New York
NY 1001
