At the Fondazione Querini Stampalia the first major exhibition in Italy dedicated to photographer Graziano Arici

Until May 1, 2023, Fondazione Querini Stampalia presents the major photography exhibition Graziano Arici. Beyond Venice ’Now is the Winter of our Discontent,’ curated by Daniel Rouvier and Ariane Carmignac, promoted by the Fondazione Querini Stampalia and the Réattu Museum in Arles, France, and realized thanks to the support of the Regione del Veneto, with the support of Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, Banca Mediolanum, Venice International Foundation and the patronage of the City of Venice, the City of Arles and the Institut Français d’Italia.

“Graziano Arici’s personal work is of an aesthetic, intellectual and technical richness, of a quality that arouses admiration,” says Daniel Rouvier co-curator of the exhibition and director of the Réattu Museum in Arles. “It cannot be reduced to a simple documentary look at the world, witnessing its evolution, its riches and its oddities. This common thread exists, but the photographer transcends it, making each of his images a photographic work in its own right, both plastically and emotionally.”

The exhibition, whose subtitle ’Now is theWinter of our Discontent’ refers to the opening sentence of the monologue from Shakespeare’s Richard III, Act I, Scene 1), aims to present an archive of the world (Albania, Germany, England, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Spain, the United States, France, Georgia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland), a ’state of things. In 2017 Graziano Arici donated his Archive (over one and a half million images, consisting largely of his own work but also thousands of photographs, prints and tens of thousands of negatives of portraits and images of international culture in Venice prior to the start of his work) to the Querini Stampalia Foundation. This donation prompted other photographers to see the Foundation as a point of preservation and enhancement of their work.

Since the beginning of his career in 1979, in parallel with the reportages he made for numerous Venetian photo agencies and institutions, Graziano Arici has pursued a personal production, which is now being presented for the first time in Italy, at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, after the great success in Arles, with an exhibition at the Réattu Museum in 2021. Graziano Arici. Beyond Venice ’Now is the Winter of our Discontent’ features a selection of over 400 photographs from 9 series, made between 1979 and 2020. The video documentary Recycling Graziano. Une lecture possible des images de Graziano Arici produced in 2015 by Sébastien Spicher, a young videomaker, will introduce visitors to the exhibition. Following in the footsteps of the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), who favored instant photography, made up of ’poor’ subjects, Arici takes this historical photography and applies to it the technologies in use in the 21st century (cell phone, scanner, digital SLR), particularly in his black and white series. In this way he gives life to works that, beyond representation, by their compositional rigor, study of light and contrasts make him considered the natural heir of the American photographer. The artist turns a sometimes ironic ( Caarnival series), often harsh and even troubled gaze on the state of the world(The State of Things, Lost Objects, Heart of Darkness), without any complacency(Le Grand Tour), plastic(Angels, Polaroids, The Winter of our Discontent). He revisits the past, his own past(Als das Kind war), but also his own production, drawing on his own images, in some cases taken more than a few decades ago, to give them a new meaning within a series. Graziano Arici operates the ’dredging up,’ carrying out a work of collecting images (glass photographic plates, old negatives, images broadcast on television) that he makes his own.

“Graziano Arici’s work takes time, requires us to enter his world, and sometimes to dwell on what might seem like a detail, but on closer inspection becomes a motif full of meaning. We are talking about hands here!” points out Daniel Rouvier in the catalog essay. “Consciously or unconsciously, the hand punctuates the images, without, however, being a subject in its own right, treated as such, but sometimes holding a primordial importance, both in the composition and as an element of discourse. This motif thus seems to create a connection between the series, extremely discreet but giving rise to a possible field of visual exploration.”

The photographer has favored the square format since his research with polaroids in the 1980s and his medium format work. Also guiding him is a systematic approach since 2012 of experimenting almost simultaneously on social media with his photographic works, without automatic cropping. The shots, both from a cell phone and with a digital SLR, are thus taken directly in this format. But the exhibition project expands the contents of the Arles exhibition and also pays homage to the lagoon city through the previous works of its great contemporary photographer. It presents Graziano Arici’s images of Venice and the people who have made it famous from 1971 to the present through three videos that collect and show to the public, in different places in the Palazzo, a conspicuous selection from the photographer’s Archive kept at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia: Veneland, Graziano Arici (2010), a normal day in Venice, from sunrise to sunset, in October 2010; Loop, Graziano Arici (2022), a brief view of 40 years of photography; and Vedova, Graziano Arici (1985; 2009), in which the photographer shoots Emilio Vedova in his studio during the creation of a painting in 1985. It is the only testimony of the artist while painting. In 2009 Arici produced the video that is presented here. After decades of working for famous news agencies, Graziano Arici with this exhibition project emerges as a great photographer.

“The Foundation has long been on a path to enhance its collections through different approaches for visitors, creating new accessibility projects to improve the cognitive experience. The exhibition and related activities are part of this path and aim to increase accessibility to the works through the use of participatory and inclusive methods that capture the public’s attention and ensure access to information,” stresses Marigusta Lazzari, director of Querini Stampalia. “This exhibition project provides a way to once again emphasize the Fondazione’s role as a living archive of the city, on this occasion through the tool of photography, both artist’s and documentary photography, a means of analyzing the social, cultural and economic transformations of a territory, a pretext for further reflection on the cultural asset as a vehicle for the growth of citizens.”

During the exhibition, Fondazione Querini Stampalia is organizing between January and April 2023 a program of meetings and insights with authors, experts and insiders curated by Lorenza Bravetta, in order to reflect on the value of the image in contemporary culture and the role of photographic archives, starting with the themes of the author’s research, and a series of free guided tours included in the entrance ticket to the Foundation.

For info: www.querinistampalia.org

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Image: Exhibition layout Graziano Arici. Beyond Venice. ’Now is the Winter of our Discontent ’ © Graziano Arici Photo by Michele Sereni.

At the Fondazione Querini Stampalia the first major exhibition in Italy dedicated to photographer Graziano Arici

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