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This category contains the following articles
- Time Machines, Robot Ballets - Laura Owens and Cao Fei at the Vienna Secession
- Grandiose Glass - Victor Man´s "Zephir" Shines at the Centre Pompidou
- City as Installation - Olivo Barbieri at the MAXXI
- Drawing Now - The Albertina Defines the Current Status Quo of Drawing
- Sunset - Mary Heilmann´s project for the new Whitney Museum
- Notes Towards a Model Opera - William Kentridge´s Major Retrospective in Peking
- Multidisciplinary Experimental Field - The New Fondazione Prada in Milan
- Basim Magdy is Deutsche Bank´s "Artist of the Year" 2016
- Happy Birthday! Deutsche Bank Congratulates the Städel Museum on its 200th Anniversary
City as Installation
Olivo Barbieri at the MAXXI
Site Specific is the title Olivo Barbieri
gave to his series for which he photographed more than 40 cities around
the world. This term is normally used to describe artworks conceived
for a specific place. Indeed, his aerial shots of Las Vegas, Istanbul,
and Brasilia, always taken from a helicopter, do not seem to show real
cities. Thanks to a special lens and digital postproduction, they look
strangely artificial instead, recalling miniature models. “I try to
look at the world like an installation,” explains the photo artist, who
was born in Carpi near Modena in 1954. Whether he shows incredible collections of
skyscrapers in Shanghai or collapsed buildings in Detroit, Site Specific shows the 21st-century city as a constantly changing construct, as an “avatar of itself,” as Barbieri put it.
Although his works have been on view at the Venice Biennale, at the MoMA, and at Tate Modern, Barbieri is only now being honored with a large retrospective in his home country. Exhibiting more than 100 photographs and films, the MAXXI in Rome is documenting his entire artistic career. Color photographs of Italian provincial towns and landscapes he took at the beginning of the 1980s were included in Viaggio in Italy in 1984. With this now legendary exhibition, the photographer and curator Luigi Ghirri has opened up a new chapter in Italian photographic history. It presents a completely new picture of the “Bel Paese” beyond any folkloristic clichés.
Among the highlights of the current show at the MAXXI are works from Barbieri’s series Artificial Illuminations (1982 – 2014), with which he is also represented in the Deutsche Bank Collection Rome. In these night shots, streets, landscapes, and tourist attractions such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa look just as unreal as the cities in Site Specific. But the bright colors and the mysterious atmosphere of these pictures are solely the result of extremely long exposure times: street lights and the headlights of cars driving past submerge the Colosseum in a bright light, which makes the amphitheater look like a movie set, while the lonely figure seen from the back in the foreground recalls Romantic landscape painting. “I have never been interested in photography. I’m interested in images,” Barbieri once said. The fantastic exhibition at the MAXXI demonstrates what he means.
OLIVO BARBIERI. IMMAGINI 1978 - 2014
May 29, 2015 – November 15, 2015
MAXXI, Rome
Although his works have been on view at the Venice Biennale, at the MoMA, and at Tate Modern, Barbieri is only now being honored with a large retrospective in his home country. Exhibiting more than 100 photographs and films, the MAXXI in Rome is documenting his entire artistic career. Color photographs of Italian provincial towns and landscapes he took at the beginning of the 1980s were included in Viaggio in Italy in 1984. With this now legendary exhibition, the photographer and curator Luigi Ghirri has opened up a new chapter in Italian photographic history. It presents a completely new picture of the “Bel Paese” beyond any folkloristic clichés.
Among the highlights of the current show at the MAXXI are works from Barbieri’s series Artificial Illuminations (1982 – 2014), with which he is also represented in the Deutsche Bank Collection Rome. In these night shots, streets, landscapes, and tourist attractions such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa look just as unreal as the cities in Site Specific. But the bright colors and the mysterious atmosphere of these pictures are solely the result of extremely long exposure times: street lights and the headlights of cars driving past submerge the Colosseum in a bright light, which makes the amphitheater look like a movie set, while the lonely figure seen from the back in the foreground recalls Romantic landscape painting. “I have never been interested in photography. I’m interested in images,” Barbieri once said. The fantastic exhibition at the MAXXI demonstrates what he means.
OLIVO BARBIERI. IMMAGINI 1978 - 2014
May 29, 2015 – November 15, 2015
MAXXI, Rome