Luca Vitone, Mare Nostrum, 2004/2007. Installation view. Commissioned work for the Deutsche Bank building in Milan-Bicocca. Photo: Roberto Marossi
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Vincenzo Castella, # 02 Milano, 2012. Installation view. Commissioned work for the Deutsche Bank building in the Via Turati, Milan.
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Vincenzo Castella, # 02 Milano, 2012. Commissioned work for the Deutsche Bank building in the Via Turati, Milan. Courtesy Le Case d'Arte. © Vincenzo Castella
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Vincenzo Castella, Monte S. Giacomo, from the series „Geografia Privata“, 1982. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Vincenzo Castella
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Vincenzo Castella, Monte S. Giacomo, from the series „Geografia Privata“, 1975. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Vincenzo Castella
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Vincenco Castella, Certosa di Padula, from the series „Geografia Privata“, 1982. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Vincenzo Castella
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Alfredo Camisa, Venditore di angurie, 1956. Deutsche Bank Collection. © The Estate of Alfredo Camisa
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Luigi Ghirri, Porto recanati, 1984. Deutsche Bank Collection. © The Estate of Luigi Ghirri
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Luigi Ghirri, Legnano Museo Fioroni, 1988/89. Deutsche Bank Collection. © The Estate of Luigi Ghirri
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Luigi Ghirri, Ravenna, 1986. Deutsche Bank Collection. © The Estate of Luigi Ghirri
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Luigi Ghirri, Fidenza, 1986. Deutsche Bank Collection. © The Estate of Luigi Ghirri
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Gabriele Basilico, Fabbrica, 1983. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Gabriele Basilico
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Gabriele Basilico, Fabbrica, 1983. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Gabriele Basilico
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Massimo Vitali, Madima Wave, 2005. Deutsche Bank Collection. Courtesy Brancolini Grimaldi. © Massimo Vitali
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Luca Andreoni / Antonio Fortugno, from the series "Non si fa in tempo ad avere paura" (There is no time to be afraid)(Tunnel), 2005-2006. Deutsche Bank Collection. © the artists
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Luca Andreoni / Antonio Fortugno, from the series "Non si fa in tempo ad avere paura" (There is no time to be afraid)(Tunnel), 2005-2006. Deutsche Bank Collection. © the artists
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Domenico Mangano, Yellow Car, 2006. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Domenico Mangano
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Armin Linke, Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas, 1999. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Armin Linke
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Old churches, hills topped by castles, beach promenades, sunsets — and, of course, the Blue Grotto. The framed postcards of Luca Vitone’s wall installation Mare Nostrum
(2001/07) depict Italy as a vacation paradise. Installed on stylized
waves that undulate along the length of a corridor wall, the cards form
the shape of a boot, the silhouette of the “Bel Paese.” In this
commissioned work for the Deutsche Bank head office
in Milan-Bicocca, Vitone not only makes an ironic reference to bank
staff’s vacation fantasies, but also the stereotypical images of Italy
that are reaffirmed again and again on millions of postcards sent
throughout the world.
In its two Milan branches — in the
university district of Bicocca, opened in 2007, and the new bank
building on the Via Turati in the city center, Deutsche Bank presents
counter-proposals to these stereotypes. Under the motto Immagini dell’Italia,
the two branches show, along with works on paper, mostly photographs
depicting images and visions of Italy in a very different way. In the
Via Turati, Vincenzo Castella’s # 02 Milano
(2012) offers a counterpoint to Vitone’s postcard motifs. The
large-scale panorama of the northern Italian metropolis is as sober as
its title. The Duomo and its towers, the glass domes of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the city’s first high-rise, the Torre Velasca,
which was finished in 1958 — while Castella depicts architectural
icons, they quickly disappear in a sea of gray facades, roofs, and
streets. As Castella says, “My point of departure is to eliminate
everything metaphorical, and with it the cult of the personal point of
view.”
Since 1998, the Milan-based photographer has focused on
big cities that he always depicts from an elevated, distanced
perspective. Along with Turin, Athens, Rotterdam, and Marseilles,
Castella has also frequently photographed his native city. And so it
was natural to ask him to create a commissioned work for the branch on
the Via Turati. In the entrance area, # 02 Milano prepares
clients, staff, and visitors for the building’s art presentation. Along
with images of Italy taken by international art photographers such as Candida Höfer and Adrian Paci,
selected Italian artists are on view in Milan. The development of
Italian photography from the 1950s to the present day can be seen at a
glance.
Luigi Ghirri
takes on an important and even revolutionary role here. The artist, who
died in 1992, not only left a mark on Italian photography through his
work, but also through an exhibition he conceived: “In 1984, Viaggio in Italia
represented also for Luigi Ghirri an official starting point for a new
vision of Italian landscape, of which he has to be regarded as the
undisputed founder,” explained the curator and Ghirri expert Elena Re.
“In fact, mainly starting from that experience, a new generation of
photographers was clearly inspired by his poetic, though pursuing their
expressive research in a completely independent way and with outcomes
that sometimes turned out to be very different.” Ghirri provided one of
the decisive impulses to preserve the Italian landscape from the
tourist’s perspective.
For a long time, Italy was considered
an arcadia that really existed, where, as Goethe formulated it,
“beautiful nature is paired with antique culture.” While during the
time of the Grand Tour
it was chiefly engravings that spread the canonized repertoire of
Italian landscape motifs to northern Europe, these were increasingly
replaced by photography in the second half of the 19th century. Yet
despite the modern medium, the motifs remained the same: craggy coasts,
idyllic folklore with fishermen on the shore. Especially popular was
the landscape with ruins, which was both sublime and romantic.
A
transition to social reality first began following World War II, when
neo-realism began to make its mark on film and literature. A flood of
picture series in “documentary” black and white emerged in the new
illustrated journals that depicted the situation in poorer regions or
life in the burgeoning cities like Milan and Turin. In the Deutsche
Bank Collection, the photographs of Alfredo Camisa
represent this era of Italian photography. Camisa’s work also, however,
announces a departure from a purely documentary photography,
oscillating instead between formal still life and street impression.
But a truly new chapter of Italian photography first began with Ghirri. As the title of his book Kodachrome (published in 1978) signalized, his world is no longer black, white, and gray. Parallel to Americans like Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, who primarily turned to landscape, Ghirri also worked in color. In Atlante (1973),
one of his earliest series, the exploration of conceptual art also
becomes clear: Ghirri photographed details from atlases —as departure
points for imaginary journeys. In a country that has been photographed
to excess, he began at a kind of point zero, from where he developed
his own images of Italy. While they are poetic, they are also a clear
counter-proposal to the nostalgic and documentary stereotypes. An eye
for the random and peripheral characterizes Ghirri’s unbelievably dense
everyday scenes, interiors, and landscapes. He took these photographs
for the most part in his native landscape, the province of
Emilia-Romagna in the north of the country. Here, in the small city of
Fidenza, he also photographed the nighttime street scenes in the Deutsche Bank Collection.
Ghirri’s
randomness, which is often melancholic, could also be understood as a
reaction to the “leaden” 1970s in Italy — a period of political crisis
and conflict, of street battles, bombings, and kidnappings. A similar
randomness also, however, marks Vincenzo Castella’s series Geografia Privata (1975-1983), with which the photographer, then at the very beginning of his career, was represented in Ghirri’s Viaggio in Italia. His cool commissioned work “# 02 Milano,” however, shows how far Castella had departed from Ghirri’s poetic visual vocabulary.
Gabriele Basilico and Massimo Vitali
are two of the country’s internationally most successful art
photographers today. They too were in Ghirri’s show. Vitali’s highly
detailed, crisp large formats of the overpopulated beaches of Rimini
and Riccione expose the realities of mass tourism — which have
developed out of what was once the exclusive Grand Tour. At the same
time, Vitali, along with Andreas Gursky and Walter Niedermayr,
stands for a photography whose cool large formats present the settings
of modern life and the collective leisure society — from supermarkets
and discos to ski slopes in the Alps.
On the other hand, Gabriele Basilico focuses exclusively on urban space. The collection owns works from his early project Milano. ritratti di fabbriche,
begun in1978. The trained architect explored the outerlying areas of
his city, aiming his camera at the factories and isolated elements,
such as chimneys and facades. His elegant black and white images lend
the dignity of an antique monument to the industrial buildings while
also bearing a resemblance to the typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher.
The fact that these things on the outskirts also occupy the younger generations can be seen in works as diverse as Andreoni_Fortugno’s symbolically charged images of empty street tunnels or Domenico Mangano’s
impressions of his native Sicily. Car wrecks and discarded armchairs on
the beach, desolate ballparks — images of the “non-locations” of a
globalized world. And in this world, Venice is no longer necessarily in
Italy: in a blindingly bright work by the Milan photographer Armin Linke,
gondolas bob up and down before a palazzo. At first glance, it
resembles a typical Canal Grande view. Then, however, the high-rises in
the background reveal that we are in the middle of Las Vegas, where the
Venetian Hotel and Casino are
presented as the thoroughly commercialized compact version of the city
of lagoons. An apt transformation, in that Venice itself has turned
into a kind of theme park. Like so many photo works in Milan, this
image of Italy also suggests that we have to look for arcadia elsewhere
today.
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