June 26th - September 6th 2014
Techincal Info
Caterina Gualco - Unimediamodern – and Clelia Belgrado - VisionQuesT contemporary photography – continue their collaboration by presenting the last exhibition of the season “Improbable Rendez-vous: Luigi Ghirri - Gabrielle Strijewski
An imaginary improbable encounter between Luigi Ghirri and Gabrielle Strijewski. despite not having ever met him, Gabrielle seems to have been affected by his poetic appeal: landscapes that are almost suspended in soft unsaturated colors, in many ways metaphysical, where the human presence is often absent but never without its intervention
Press Release
Caterina Gualco - Unimediamodern – and Clelia Belgrado - VisionQuesT contemporary photography – continue their collaboration by presenting the last exhibition of the season “Improbable Rendez-vous: Luigi Ghirri - Gabrielle Strijewski”. We feel the need to thank Ben Patterson, a friend and fan of Gabrielle Strijewski, who acted as her mentor for us. About a year ago Ben had shown us a series of photographs by Gabrielle; they immediately caught our interest. Gabrielle later came to Genoa and showed us her work of the "Olhao, Portugal" project, photographs taken in the town of Olhao in the Algarve region in Portugal. Looking at these images from the most classical, urban documentary photography point of view, Gabrielle’s almost abstract images reveal the identity of the city without showing anything obvious like people, buildings or roads. The photographer has captured the essence of Olhao in a series of images that can be considered works of art in their own right. In these rich and complex compositions, Gabrielle’s incomparable sense of light, color and texture, saturate all subject matter with a special charm. Her work immediately sent us back to the photography of Luigi Ghirri; Gabrielle did not know him but she seems to have been affected by his poetic appeal: her landscapes appear out of context, the colors are tenuous, never saturated, in some ways almost metaphysical. The human presence is almost always absent, but we understand his constant intervention on the places chosen as objects of the photographs. We therefore imagined an unlikely encounter - an "Improbable Rendez-vous" - between this contemporary German photographer and our great Luigi Ghirri. Ghirri’s landscapes are also suspended, not realistic, metaphysical, often devoid of human figures, but never devoid of the human intervention on the landscape. His pictures are usually in color, but the delicate, unsaturated use of this color is crucial for his poetics, where in an almost meditative silence, the icons of everyday life emerge from the anonymous to become art landscapes and architecures, places of attention and affection. Finally, it seems remarkable that for both artists photography is understood as the unfinìshed object, as a work in progress, in a constant state of elaboration, without time and space, where the eye is free to move and play with eternity