MA*GA exhibits for the first time the entire collection of works related to photographic languages

From July 16 to October 22, 2023, the MA*GA Museum in Gallarate (VA) presents Il Profilo dell’Immagine. Art and Photography in Italy, a project to rearrange the museum collection curated by Alessandro Castiglioni and Emma Zanella, deputy director and director of the museum, respectively, to show the public the new acquisitions, obtained thanks to the allocation of two different public notices promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. With PAC2021 - Plan for Contemporary Art, MA*GA acquired a fund of twenty-five works by Armin Linke and, thanks to Photography Strategy 2022, two works by Bruno Di Bello and Paola Di Bello join the collection.

“The title of the exhibition evokes the particular identity of the photographic language suspended between documentation and representation, its ’infra-subtle’ nature, as defined by photography critic Elio Grazioli, the ambivalence between technical image and artistic image, questioning the public about the significance that thephotographic image has had in our recent history and in our contemporary times, since, in the words of American critic David Levi Strauss, ’photography, in theory, has always wanted to make the image democratic, but it has rarely worked in that sense,’” the curators say.

The project presents MA*GA’s collection of works related to photographic languages to the public for the first time in its entirety. The exhibition is configured as a narrative in which different episodes and authors alternate and follow one another, interweaving research dedicated to the image its fragmentation with authors such as Emilio Isgrò and Valentina Berardinone, continuing with MEC Art by Gianni Bertini, Bruno Di Bello and Aldo Tagliaferro, the dialogue with visual poetry, mail art and performance with Mirella Bentivoglio, Maria Lai and Giuseppe Chiari up to the linguistic research of Franco Vaccari. The exhibition is completed by addressing the question related to the persistence of landscape in the identities and non-identities of places with the works of Luigi Ghirri and Marina Ballo Charmet, up to the large cycles of photographic productions commissioned by the museum such as the project Ex/post Temporary Horizons by Mario Cresci and Multiplications by Armin Linke.

The exhibition is divided into three sections that analyze different attitudes and methodologies of working around the image and photographic languages. The first, Fragments of the Real, analyzes those works made between the 1960s and 1970s in which the photographic image emerges as a fragment of reality, a transformed detail, taken out of its context and given a new meaning. Examples are the work of Emilio Isgrò, that of Franco Vaccari or the collages of Mirella Bentivoglio. The second section hosts research dedicated to the idea of repetition, reproduction and multiplication, at the center of which is the work of Armin Linke. The third and final section, on the other hand, is dedicated to the idea of photography that investigates space as language and moves in search of an elsewhere. Paola Di Bello’s La Disparition opens this section, joined by works by Maurizio Montagna, Mario Cresci, Francesco Bertocco and Marzia Migliora’s installation.

For info: www.museomaga.it

Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Image: Armin Linke, Multiplications, 2018, Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, Gallarate. (Chromogenic print mounted on Alu-Dibond panel with white painted wooden frame, 150 x 200 cm)

MA*GA exhibits for the first time the entire collection of works related to photographic languages

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