An exhibition in Rome showcases the vision of the Eternal City according to Gabriele Basilico

In Rome, the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, together with the Museo Nazionale Romano - Palazzo Altemps, MUFOCO - Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Basilico Archive, presents the exhibition entitled Gabriele Basilico. Rome. The event, organized on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the birth of the famous master of Italian photography, offers a new perspective on the visual work of Gabriele Basilico (Milan, 1944 - 2013). The exhibition will be open to the public from Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024, to Sunday, Feb. 23, 2025, within the halls of Palazzo Altemps in Rome.

Curated by Matteo Balduzzi and Giovanna Calvenzi, the exhibition offers for the first time an itinerary that traces Basilico’s main photographic investigations dedicated to Rome, a city that the Milanese photographer deeply loved and assiduously frequented. Through a selection of more than fifty works, the exhibition project is designed to establish a direct dialogue with the spaces of Palazzo Altemps, whose rooms interact intimately with the subjects immortalized in the photographs.

The path of the exhibition

The exhibition’s main thread revolves around the profound relationship between Gabriele Basilico and the Eternal City, developed over the course of twenty professional assignments received between 1985 and 2011, from which numerous photographic campaigns were born. Central themes in Basilico’s work, such as the layering of epochs and architectural styles and the dialogue between historical monuments and the more common urban fabric, find their highest expression in Rome. The city is thus revealed through the narrative of a modernity capable of harmoniously integrating the imposing and polished architecture of rationalism with the temples, arches and palaces of antiquity, within an extraordinarily coherent overall monumentality.

The exhibition is developed around two main sections. On the one hand, the exploration ofrationalist architecture and the coexistence of civic and monumental elements, which characterize the urban fabric of Rome; on the other hand, insights into the different representations of the Colosseum and works that investigate the relationship between the human figure and contemporary architecture. The fulcrum of the exhibition and the point of connection between the two exhibition nuclei is the section dedicated to Gabriele Basilico’s archive, where 60 original sheets of contact specimens are exhibited, accompanied by a wide selection of notes and annotations made during the seven main projects conducted on the capital, for a total of more than 250 images.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication edited by Angelo Piero Cappello, Giovanna Calvenzi and Matteo Balduzzi, and published by Electa. The work, promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, is produced in collaboration with MUFOCO - Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Gabriele Basilico Archive.

An exhibition in Rome showcases the vision of the Eternal City according to Gabriele Basilico

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