Rome, Maurizio Cattelan curator of an exhibition on color photography that makes you happy

TheAcademy of France in Rome - Villa Medici welcomes from February 28 to June 9, 2025 the exhibition CHROMOTHERAPIA. Color Photography That Makes You Happy, featuring Maurizio Cattelan and Sam Stourdzé as curators. The exhibition aims to trace the history of 20th-century color photography through the gaze of nineteen artists-Miles Aldridge, Erwin Blumenfeld, Guy Bourdin, Juno Calypso, Walter Chandoha, Harold Edgerton, Hassan Hajjaj, Hiro, Ouka Leele, Yevonde Middleton, Arnold Odermatt, Ruth Ossai, Martin Parr, Pierre and Gilles, Alex Prager, Adrienne Raquel, Sandy Skoglund, Toiletpaper, and William Wegman.

Divided into seven sections (EARLY BIRDS, RAINING CATS AND DOGS, GLOSSY, FEMME FATALE, STRANGER THINGS, FOODORAMA, MAKE A FACE), the exhibition aims to transport the public into vibrant and colorful worlds. Often disparaged and rarely taken seriously, color photography has actually allowed photographers to indulge, to put their palette to work to repaint the world. So many photographers have freed themselves from the documentary constraints of the photographic medium to explore the common roots of image and imagery, confronting pop, surrealism, bling, kitsch and baroque. The conquest of color in photography closely follows the invention of the medium with the first experiments for scientific purposes in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1907 the first industrial photographic process in color was developed thanks to the autochrome, created by the Lumière brothers: the beginning of a century of color experimentation. From ordinary scenes to philosophical and political reflections, color transcends the simple tool to become an essential narrative element.

These innovations of the everyday reveal surreal, hyperreal imagery that reinvents genres-from still life to portraiture-offering a joyful, colorful vision of the world. Among the artists in the exhibition, William Wegman (1943, Holyoke, USA) depicts his dogs by transforming them into artistic icons, Juno Calypso (1989, London, UK) twists the visual conventions of film and advertising to question the impositions that plague femininity, while Arnold Odermatt (1925, Oberdorf - 2021, Stans, CH), a police photographer, documents traffic accidents in careful compositions where poetry replaces drama; Walter Chandoha (1920, Bayonne - 2019, Annandale, USA) instead photographs cats against saturated backgrounds. Ouka Leele (1957-2022, Madrid) uses vibrant tones to capture the liberation of bodies in the context of the Movida cultural and social revolution, and Martin Parr (1952, Epsom, UK) ironically suggests the bulimia of the modern world through trays of potato chips. In the 1910s, the magazine Toiletpaper, conceived by Maurizio Cattelan (1960, Padua, IT) and Pierpaolo Ferrari (1971, Milan, Italy), at once heir and forerunner, and utterly transgressive, dialogues and feeds on this sparkling, chromatic little story. Color photography offers an intensely chromatic vision of the world.

Rome, Maurizio Cattelan curator of an exhibition on color photography that makes you happy

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