Gabriele Basilico – Fotografie dalle Collezioni del MAXXI

Oltre 70 fotografie provenienti dalle collezioni del MAXXI Arte e del MAXXI Architettura per raccontare la lunga e felice collaborazione tra il museo e uno dei massimi interpreti della fotografia di architettura in Italia: il MAXXI rende così omaggio a Gabriele Basilico, un grande maestro che attraverso le sue fotografie ha saputo offrire suggestioni, riflessioni, visioni proprie di un grande artista.

Comunicato stampa

“Quello che mi interessa in modo costante, quasi ossessivo,
è il paesaggio urbano contemporaneo, il fenomeno sociale ed estetico
delle grandi, rapide, incontenibili trasformazioni in atto nelle città del pianeta”.
Gabriele Basilico

Oltre 70 fotografie provenienti dalle collezioni del MAXXI Arte e del MAXXI Architettura per raccontare la lunga e felice collaborazione tra il museo e uno dei massimi interpreti della fotografia di architettura in Italia: il MAXXI rende così omaggio a Gabriele Basilico, un grande maestro che attraverso le sue fotografie ha saputo offrire suggestioni, riflessioni, visioni proprie di un grande artista.

Dalle immagini dello stretto di Messina realizzate per il progetto Atlante Italiano del 2003, alle foto del cantiere del MAXXI per Cantiere d’Autore del 2009, fino agli splendidi scatti dedicati alla mostra di Luigi Moretti che ha inaugurato il museo nel maggio 2010, la mostra Gabriele Basilico. Fotografie dalle Collezioni del MAXXI ricostruisce, attraverso le numerose committenze realizzate, una vera e propria biografia del MAXXI oltre che la storia di una felice collaborazione.

In mostra anche una serie di fotografie tratte dai lavori più significativi del percorso artistico di Basilico, come le celebri immagini di Beirut dopo la guerra e una serie di ritratti di città italiane che testimoniano la sua straordinaria capacità di leggere il paesaggio urbano.
Completa l’esposizione anche un film-documentario inedito di Amos Gitai dedicato al fotografo: una lunga intervista in cui Basilico racconta il suo lavoro e che viene presentata in anteprima al MAXXI proprio in occasione della mostra.

I cultivate the illusion and the hope that a willingness to observe
and to accept the contemporary urban condition
may be an effective starting point
for imagining a better city and a better future.
Gabriele Basilico
(from ABITARE LE METROPOLI Edizioni Contrasto, 2013)

Rome, 27 November 2013. MAXXI is devoting a major exhibition to the great master of Italian photography who passed away recently: 70 large format photographs from the MAXXI collections that testify to the long and successful collaboration between the museum and Gabriele Basilico.

From the images of the Strait of Messina for the Italian Atlas project from 2003 to the photos of MAXXI for Cantiere d’Autore from 2009, from the photos of the Zanussi offices for Contemporary Gazes to the magnificent shots for the exhibition of the work of Luigi Moretti that inaugurated the museum in the May of 2010 (all MAXXI Architettura commissions), through to the urban portraits acquired by MAXXI Arte, the exhibition Gabriele Basilico. Photographs from the MAXXI Collections (28 November 2013 – 30 March 2014) curated by Giovanna Calvenzi and Francesca Fabiani, reconstructs a comprehensive biography of MAXXI itself as well as the story of a long and happy collaboration.

The MAXXI exhibition also features the preview of a new documentary film by the Israeli director and architect Amos Gitai devoted to the photographer.
Furthermore, the exhibition will also be the setting for the presentation of the book by Gabriele Basilico Abitare le metropoli, published by Contrasto, that for the first time brings together the text written and presented by the photographer over two evenings at the Teatro N’hma-Teresa Pomodoro in Milan in 2010 and a selection of photographs.

The exhibition is configured in five sections that draw attention to Basilico’s interest in the architectural idiom and his extraordinary ability to interpret the city and its continuous mutation.
Italian Atlas Portrait of a changing Italy, from 2003, is a research project focussing on landscape to which Basilico contributed an investigation of the two banks of the Strait of Messina between Sicily and Calabria, privileging an extended and raised viewpoint embracing the landscape in its entirety.
Contemporary gazes. 50 years of Italian architecture: a “game” for reinterpreting with new eyes the Italian architecture of the second half of the 20th Century in which Basilico participated by documenting with extreme perspectives the Zanussi offices at Porcia (PN) built by Gino Valle in 1957-61.
Cantiere d’autore. Architecture and photography for MAXXI in progress: a photographic project devoted to the MAXXI construction site, of which Basilico recorded the conclusive phase in 2009, creating an accurate and participatory portrait of the museum; photographs that shed light on the developing identity of the structure designed by Zaha Hadid.
The architecture of Luigi Moretti: a photographic survey focussing on the architect’s built works on the occasion of the exhibition Luigi Moretti: From Rationalism to the informal, inaugurated in 2010. Images of an extraordinary composition rigour, emblematic of his morphological and formal interest in architecture.
The cities: this section comprises the series of 15 photographs from the MAXXI Arte Collection that bear testimony to Basilico’s research into the transformations of the urban landscape between 1980 and 2003. These are some of the photographer’s most intense images, from the first explorations of his Milan to the shots dedicated to the Italian cities and his vision of Rome with its ancient ruins and new architecture, through to Beirut, to which the photographer turns in order to revive its identity above and beyond the wounds of a recently concluded war.

A corpus of large format photographs that reveal the “insistent” and reflective way of looking typical of the photographer as well as his habit of the walking the length and breadth of a city. Photography is for Basilico a device for understanding the complexity of the world, an instrument for decoding space, both urban and natural, shedding light on its constitutional elements, with a lucid vision that reflects a similar clarity of thought.

The exposition is completed by the new documentary film by the Israeli director and architect Amos Gitai devoted to the photographer. A long interview realised by Gitai during the 2012 Biennale of Architecture in which Basilico talks about his work and which is being previewed at MAXXI on the occasion of the exhibition. Starting out from their shared architectural training, as well as the friendship and joint projects that tied him to the photographer, in this interview Gitai draws attention to certain crucial documentary themes: the possibility of recounting the present, the implication of the auteur and the relationship with history.

Gabriele Basilico. Photographs from the MAXXI Collections not only pays tribute to one of the greatest interpreters of architectural photography in Italy, but also reveals the profound transversality of the art of photography. The eye of this great master has in fact succeeded in recounting the history and evolution of the Italian landscape and Italian architecture of recent decades while also offering through his photographs the suggestions, reflections and visions of a great artist.

It should also be noted that from 23 November 2013 to 26 January 2014, the Civic Gallery of Modena will be hosting the exhibition Gabriele Basilico in the collection of the Civic Gallery of Modena, curated by Silvia Ferrari in collaboration with Giovanna Calvenzi. An exhibition that presents not only Basilico’s social gaze on his initial approach to photography, but also the photographer’s ties to the city of Modena which features in many of his great documentary campaigns (http://www.galleriacivicadi )

Gabriele Basilico (Milan, 1944-2013). After graduating in architecture, Basilico gave the drawing board in the mid-Seventies to devote himself exclusively to photography. Starting out from an exploration of the periphery and the factories of his own city, over the years his interest shifted towards other cities, attracted both by zones of confine and monumental sites and their historical stratification. During the 1980s he developed an interest that led him from the city to the landscape, ratified by his participation as the only Italian in the Mission Photographique de la DATAR, before returning to the city and its architecture.