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 ‘Selvatico (colui che si salva)’ (Wild [He Who Saves Himself]) is Alessandra Spranzi’s second solo exhibition at Fotografia Italiana Arte Contemporanea, and is a new departure in the career of this Milanese artist and photographer.
Almost since the outset, Spranzi’s work has consisted of series of photographs that are compact as far as both their subject-matter and their format are concerned, and are variations on the same underlying theme. The photographs in this exhibition have interrupted this practice. Mostly taken outside the studio, they record chance encounters with various objects and places, such as an umbrella abandoned in the street, a hotel sign, a net filled with basketballs and amateur photographs of furniture and animals that the artist has rephotographed from classified ads magazines and enlarged. And the format of the pictures varies as much as their contents.
In their own way, these photographs also form a series. Their unity is to be found in an overall emotional climate and in the impressions and associations of ideas that the artist expresses in the exhibition’s title.
‘Salvatico è quel che si salva’ (Wild is he who saves himself) is one of Leonardo da Vinci’s aphorisms contained in the Codex Trivulzianus. Spranzi interprets this freely as a call to abandon the certainty of the ‘house’ (the domestic environment, the studio, acquired visual culture, culture in general and so on) in order to try to find a ‘wild’ condition that is both intuitive and emotional in one’s relationship with the world and nature.
The result is unexpected and anything but comforting. In these photographs, nature is a form of residual vitality existing between the fabric of the urban environment (for example, images of animals in captivity); pictures of broken or abandoned objects allude to a form of freedom from habit and the principle of efficiency, while they also express a sense of precariousness and loss.
Inauguration: Friday 19 September, from 6.30 pm to 10 pm.
In occasion of the opening of the exhibition season 2008/2009 and the exceptional late opening of the galleries of Milan promoted by Start, the show will be open to the public Saturday 20 September, from 11 am to 10 pm and Sunday 21 September, from 11 am to 7 pm.
The exhibition will run until Tuesday 28 October, 2008
Hours: Tuesday to Friday, from 3 pm to 7 pm.
Closed Sunday and Monday, open Saturday by appointment from 3 pm to 7 pm.
The exhibition is curated by Simone Menegoi. A catalogue is available at the gallery, with texts by Simeone Menegoi and Alessandra Spranzi.
Fotografia Italiana arte contemporanea
Corso Venezia 22, 20121 Milan
Tel +39 02 784100 |
