Rome, at the MACRO an exhibition with Hervé Guibert's shots where the human is absent

On view at MACRO in Rome from March 9 to May 21 is the exhibition Hervé Guibert: This and More, curated by Anthony Huberman and organized in collaboration with the Wattis Institute in San Francisco: the show presents a selection of photographs by French writer, journalist and photographer Hervé Guibert (Paris, 1955 - 1991). While Guibert’s photographic work is predominantly associated with portraits, in this case the exhibition explores a core of unusual works, in which the artist rather captures the absence of the human element: the photographs do not contain faces but inanimate objects, interiors and domestic spaces charged with memories and emotions that evoke the presence of off-screen characters.

A good photograph, in Guibert’s words, is not necessarily one that makes a person or place visible, but one that is “faithful to the memory of my emotion.” Laconic and reserved, the photographs on display in the exhibition offer an approach to portraiture in which what matters is what is missing from the image: laden with feelings of love as well as traumatic aspects, these interior spaces invite us to imagine the people who lived and inhabited them. The works lay bare the most intimate aspects of the artist while maintaining the privacy of private moments, whose protagonists are kept safe, or tragically distant, outside the frame. Rather than seeking a sense of objective truth, the exhibition highlights all that is subjective and invisible in a photograph, in which memories, anecdotes and absences are layered.

Well known in France, where his work has helped raise awareness ofAIDS, Guibert has had a special relationship with Italy. Passionate about the cinema of Pasolini, Fellini and Antonioni, he stayed for a long time on theisland of Elba, where he wrote many of his texts throughout his life. He also lived in Rome, between 1987 and 1989 in residence at Villa Medici and extending his stay the following year.

The exhibition will move to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (June 9-Aug. 20, 2023).

Special thanks to Christine Guibert and Françoise Morin, Les Douches la Galerie, and Photi Giovanis of Callicoon Fine Arts.

Hervé Guibert has been a writer, photographer and photography critic. He published his first book, La Mort propagande, at the age of 22 in 1977. That same year he began editing a column on photography for Le Monde and worked as the newspaper’s photo critic of record until 1985, writing about artists, writers and philosophers such as Patrice Chéreau, Roland Barthes, Isabelle Adjani, Michel Foucault, Miquel Barceló and Sophie Calle. Between 1977 and his untimely death in 1991, he wrote more than twenty-five novels and short stories, always in the first person, including Suzanne et Louise (1980), L’Image fantôme (1982), Des aveugles (1985), Fou de Vincent (1989). His 1990 novel À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie brought him media acclaim and great public notoriety, and he played a significant role in changing French public attitudes toward AIDS. In 1992 French television posthumously broadcast La Pudeur ou l’impudeur, a film Guibert made about himself as he was losing his battle with AIDS. Guibert’s photographs were the subject of a retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris in 2011 and at the Loewe Foundation in Madrid in 2019. Other recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Callicoon Fine Arts in New York (2014 and 2019), Galerie Les Douches in Paris (2018, 2020, 2021), Kristina Kite Gallery in Los Angeles (2018), and Galerie Felix Gaudlitz in Vienna (2020).

For all information, you can visit MACRO’s official website.

Pictured: Hervé Guibert, Les billes (1983). Ph. credit: Christine Guibert/Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

Rome, at the MACRO an exhibition with Hervé Guibert's shots where the human is absent

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