UGO MULAS – THE SENSITIVE SURFACE
2014-12-22By the time of his untimely death in 1973, Ugo Mulas was recognized as a master of portraiture, reportage, fashion and advertising photography. He photographed artists and artworks during one of the most dynamic periods in the history of art, the 1960s, when he portrayed the likes of Jasper Johns, Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and countless members of the Italian avant-garde like Lucio Fontana. Lesser known is the work Mulas made at the end of the 1960s, work that explores the conceptualist potential of photography at that time. This exhibition features this robust period of experimentation centered in the artist’s studio dating from 1969-1973. Complimenting this late period in Mulas’s career are selections of the artist’s lesser-known color work and a few standout examples of the artist’s enlarged contact sheets, a motif that found recurrence in Mulas’s work following a seminal trip to New York City in 1964.
Collaborating with Bruno Munari and Luciano Caramel, Mulas co-organized Campo Urbano, an exhibition of performances and events that took place on the streets of Como in 1969. Recognizing the photograph as inherently performative in its own right, Mulas shot sequences of images askew and oblique at times that played with the unpredictable, ephemeral quality of the happenings. Often printed and enlarged directly from the contact sheets, Mulas’s Campo Urbano works subvert the narrative, chronological framing of the event to become something else entirely, another kind of art work or experience.
Exhibition runs through till February 14th, 2015
Galleria Lia Rumma Milan
Via Stilicone, 19
20154 Milano
