Photography meets ceramics: unpublished corpus of Luigi Ghirri on display in Sassuolo

From September 16 to October 31, 2021, the Palazzo Ducale in Sassuolo will host the exhibition Luigi Ghirri. The Marazzi Years 1975-1985, curated by Ilaria Campioli. In the archives of theceramics company, an unpublished nucleus of Luigi Ghirri ’s photographs has been preserved for decades, which will now be exhibited for the first time in the recently refurbished spaces of theAppartamento dei Giganti. The exhibition is intended to recount the encounter between the Emilian photographer and the company and their collaboration that began in Sassuolo in 1975.

Born in Scandiano in 1943 but moved with his family to Sassuolo when he was three years old, Luigi Ghirri first met Marazzi, a ceramics company founded in the 1930s, in 1975. The photographer was in a phase of growth and experimentation that dialogued well with Marazzi’s direction of research and development in those years, centered on certain fundamental junctures such as color, size, and internationalization. A unique partnership was born between Ghirri and Marazzi, for which the artist realized, involving also John Batho, Cuchi White and Charles Traub, a research project in which ceramics is freely read as surface and mental space, infinite possibility of composition, light and color.

In ten years, Ghirri created for Marazzi an important body of works, almost completely released from the canons of the advertising image and consistent with the artistic and visual research and themes dear to the photographer in those years, such as the surface, the common object, the project, the landscape, and light as genius loci. It is precisely these works that will be the protagonists of the exhibition in Sassuolo’s Palazzo Ducale: an exhibition project realized by the Estensi Galleries in collaboration with theLuigi Ghirri Archive and Marazzi Group.

“With the exhibition we are celebrating a little-known but extremely fascinating aspect of the work of Luigi Ghirri, who was a reference personality of Italian photography in the second half of the 20th century,” said Martina Bagnoli, director of the Estensi Galleries. “This exhibition in collaboration with Marazzi reiterates the close and successful relationship that the Estensi Galleries have with the territory and with the fervent entrepreneurial reality that characterizes these lands.”

Thirty photographs will be on display in the Appartamento dei Giganti, reopened to the public on the occasion of the exhibition, presenting them for the first time after being stored for nearly four decades in Marazzi’s archives.

“In the production created for Marazzi, Luigi Ghirri inserts ceramic material within a broader reflection on representation,” explains curator Ilaria Campioli. “Surfaces become part of that system of measuring and reducing the world to scale that was so important for the author in those years. The combination of the different planes and the grids allow him to deepen his reflection on knowledge and learning, as if they were a sheet of paper on which to learn each time to write and draw.”

Alongside the exhibition, the exhibition project saw the publication of a valuable volume of the same name not intended for sale and the creation of an in-depth website(www.ghirri.marazzi.it) completely dedicated to this special production of Ghirri’s. The exhibition itinerary had a symbolic beginning with the exhibition of a small focus dedicated to the symbolic work of this operation, hosted in the rooms of the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia on the occasion of the 2021 edition of the Fotografia Europea festival; after Sassuolo the exhibition, in itinerant form, will have an international development with a first exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris from November 10, 2021, on the occasion of Paris Photo.

“We are very happy to be able to give value to this unique association, born between one of the greatest masters of Italian photography and the company, by exhibiting Ghirri’s works in one of the symbolic places of the territory such as the Palazzo Ducale in Sassuolo of the Gallerie Estensi,” said Mauro Vandini, CEO of Marazzi. “We are also happy that this partnership, thanks to the invaluable support of the Archives and Adele Ghirri in the realization of this project, continues to this day.”

For info: https://www.ghirri.marazzi.it/

Hours: Friday through Sunday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Tuesday through Thursday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. by appointment.

For the Philosophy Festival open Sept. 17 and i8 from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., Sept. 19 from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., with free admission.

Tickets: Full 6 euros.

Image: Luigi Ghirri. The Marazzi Years 1975 - 1985 ©Eredi Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Marazzi Ceramics.

Photography meets ceramics: unpublished corpus of Luigi Ghirri on display in Sassuolo

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