Nino Migliori's portraits of artists on display at Reggia di Colorno: 86 unpublished works

From October 15, 2022 to April 10, 2023, the Reggia di Colorno will host an exhibition of photographic portraits by Nino Migliori (Bologna, 1926), entitled Nino Migliori. The Art of Portraying Artists and organized as part of the 2022 edition of Colornophotolife, the annual photography festival welcomed by the Reggia that once belonged to Maria Luigia of Austria, in Colorno, Parma.

Migliori’s monograph exhibits as many as 86 previously unpublished works, almost all of them portraits of artists he frequented, made between the 1950s and today, which allow us to retrace, through the different techniques adopted, the research and explorations of the photographic medium conducted over more than seventy years of activity. The exhibition, curated by Sandro Parmiggiani, with the direction of Antonella Balestrazzi, is accompanied by a bilingual (Italian/English) catalog.

The visiting itinerary is divided into five sections: the black-and-white portraits, started in the 1950s, when Migliori was in Venice and frequented Peggy Guggenheim’s house, and developed up to recent years; the color images in which he often operates a dislocation of planes and sometimes cuts out images and relocates them in space; the sequences of images taken from the television medium and conceived as photograms in the making; the large color “transfigurations” (100 x 100 cm) in which Migliori intervenes “pictorially” on the image; the recent portraits in black and white “by matchlight,” which apply some of his reconnaissance conducted on “candlelight” sculptures. Many are the protagonists of the art scene that visitors to the exhibition will recognize through their portraits: Enrico Baj, Vasco Bendini, Agenore Fabbri, Gianfranco Pardi, Guido Strazza, Sergio Vacchi, Luciano De Vita, Salvatore Fiume, Virgilio Guidi, Piero Manai, Man Ray, Luciano Minguzzi, Zoran Music, Luigi Ontani, Robert Rauschenberg, Ferdinando Scianna, Tancredi Parmeggiani, Ernesto Treccani, Emilio Vedova, Lamberto Vitali, Andy Warhol, Wolfango, Italo Zannier, among others; Antonio Gades, Bruno Saetti, Lucio Saffaro, Alberto Sughi, Emilio Tadini; Eugenio Montale, Gian Maria Volonté, Giovanni Romagnoli and Franco Gentilini; Karel Appel, Enzo Mari, Fausto Melotti, Tonino Guerra, Pompilio Mandelli, Marisa Merz, Bruno Munari, Fabrizio Plessi, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Lucio Del Pezzo; Mario Botta, Ugo Nespolo, Elisabetta Sgarbi.

“In front of Nino Migliori’s photographs it is necessary to remember,” says Sandro Parmiggiani, "that with him nothing must be taken for granted: the camera, the film (and now the digital support), the papers on which the images are printed are not subservient to a predetermined function, but it can always be redefined and explored in new directions. Migliori has been, since 1948, a strenuous investigator of the possibilities offered by the medium, technical procedures and materials of photography; in addition to being the author of splendid neorealist photographs-many remember the iconic The Diver, 1951-he grappled with burns on film and celluloid, with experiences on paper and glass, with photographs of walls and posters, with the search for the ’hidden face’ of polaroids, with recent experiences with kaleidoscopes of different sizes (two of the portraits in the exhibition are made with this technique): Inexhaustible research and verification fueled by the visions and experiments that this sort of artist-photographer-shaman has conducted on his journey within photography."

“It would therefore be limiting to define him as a ’photographer,’” Parmeggiani adds, “since Migliori never conceived of the photographic medium as a mere instrument of conformity to the statutes and canons of photography-’an image that fixes reality, in a moment of its becoming’-but something that could allow him to approach certain visions that have always intrigued him. It is enough to think of the experiences conducted since 2006, when he decided to photograph the Zooforo, the impressive medieval bestiary sculpted by Benedetto Antelami on the Baptistery of Parma Cathedral, imagining to restore the nocturnal vision of it that the inhabitants of the city could have of it, and its visitors, by passing by the octagonal tower and discovering, by the light of flashlights, the fantastic shapes that snaked around its perimeter, recreating in the night, with appropriate covers, a deep darkness and approaching and slowly moving a candle to the tiles, until its secret face was revealed. From that experience came cycles in which Migliori photographed in the absence of light monuments and sculptures, and executed portraits of people in absolute darkness, with their faces illuminated by the light of a match, as some photographs in the Colorno exhibition document.”

Nino Migliori was born in Bologna in 1926, where he still lives and works. He began photographing in 1948, alternating neorealist and formalist photography with experimentation and research, based on techniques invented and refined by himself, which led him to expressions often akin to the vicissitudes of painting (such as informal) and conceptual experiences. In the 1950s, a friend of Tancredi and Emilio Vedova, he frequented Peggy Guggenheim’s house in Venice, while in Bologna he bonded with artists such as Vasco Bendini, Vittorio Mascalchi, and Luciano Leonardi. In 1977 the CSAC (Center for Studies and Archives of Communication) at the University of Parma dedicated its first major anthological exhibition to him, curated by its founder, Arturo Carlo Quintavalle; since 1978 Migliori has been a lecturer in the History of Photography at the University of Parma’s Advanced Course in Art History; he donated a substantial body of works to the CSAC over the years. In 1979 he taught a memorable course as part of the event “Venice 79 Photography,” under the auspices of Unesco and the International Center of Photography in New York, having off-camera experiments as its program. In 1982 Migliori gives birth to Abrecal - Gruppo Ricerca Percezione Globale (1982-1991), which is aimed primarily at young people and is linked back to Futurist poetics in the sense of breaking pre-established patterns and freedom of expression: the name is in fact the inverse of “Lacerba.” Since the 1970s he has been running workshops, and frequently teaching in schools of various levels (including preschools) and museum institutions. In 2016 the artist gives birth to the “Nino Migliori Foundation.”

For all information you can visit the website of the Reggia di Colorno.

Image: Nino Migliori, Alberto Sughi, 1978

Nino Migliori's portraits of artists on display at Reggia di Colorno: 86 unpublished works

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