An exhibition in Brescia brings together 122 works by Franco Fontana, pioneer of color photography

The Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia is celebrating Franco Fontana(Modena, Italy, 1933), one of the pioneers of color photography, on the occasion of his 90th birthday with a major monographic exhibition. The exhibition, scheduled from March 8 to July 28, 2024, entitled Franco Fontana. Color, curated by Studio Fontana, promoted by Fondazione Brescia Musei and co-produced with Skira Arte, will present 122 images made between 1961 and 2017. The exhibition is the outcome of a long and significant work of investigation and restoration on the artist’s works, both analog and digital, which has resulted in an important body of images capable of narrating and bearing witness to the long work of Franco Fontana and his studio.

Franco Fontana. Color is one of the most anticipated events of the 7th edition of the Brescia Photo Festival, promoted by the Municipality of Brescia and Fondazione Brescia Musei, in collaboration with Ma.Co.f - Center of Italian Photography, this year declined around the title Witnesses, a term that emphasizes the ability of photographers to document the present by encouraging the reading of history through the story told by the images.

Starting from the assumption that, for Fontana, everything is or becomes landscape, the exhibition documents the Emilian master’s research by exploring themes such as “natural landscape,” “urban landscape,” “presence absence,” “human landscape,” “American light,” “fragments,” “highways,” and “asphalts,” through an installation, curated by Top Tag, that leads the visitor toward a progressive elevation, beginning with scenes dense with humanity in the first section and culminating in “abstract” and natural landscapes in the final section.

From the late 1950s, Fontana began working with color, triggering a radical change from the established norms of black-and-white art photography, questioning the codes of representation inherited from neorealism and paying attention to the aesthetic component and the search for form. His choice of field in countertendency to the majority of his colleagues is to make color the protagonist not as a medium, but as a message, not as a casual fact, but as the main actor of the scene.

The exhibition itinerary, divided into 4 sections, opens with People, which documents his research on “human landscapes.”

In Urban, the exhibition explores urban landscapes with scenarios and objects còlected from a particular perspective. In this case, it is buildings, city or metropolitan views, details such as graffiti, palm trees, and decorative elements that attract Fontana’s attention and continues with the Asphalt section in which the Emilian artist gives shape to a new landscape, that of highways and the asphalt surfaces that characterize them. Thus, horizons as well as their complements, be they road signs, paint lines or cracks in the road, become protagonists.

The exhibition is completed with Landscape, which documents Fondana’s investigation of the natural landscape, where the images, captured during his travels around the world, are characterized by the intense contrast between colors and geometries composed on the light where Fontana creates an alienating effect, to the point that the viewer of these images struggles to understand whether it is a photograph or a painting.

At the conclusion of the exhibition a video interview with the photographer produced by Studio Fontana will allow a better understanding of the man and artist Franco Fontana.

An extensive Skira Arte for Fondazione Brescia Musei catalog accompanies the exhibition, with an introduction by Nicolas Ballario and a text by Caterina Mestrovich.

For all information, you can visit the official website of Brescia Musei.

An exhibition in Brescia brings together 122 works by Franco Fontana, pioneer of color photography

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