Senigallia recounts the sea in exhibition dedicated to Marone collection

For the 2024 summer season, Senigallia City of Photography continues its commitment to promoting great national and international photography by dedicating an exhibition to a collection such as that of Rita and Riccardo Mar one. As Deep as the Sea The Rita and Riccardo Marone Collection is the exhibition curated by Angela Madesani that will be hosted in the halls of Palazzo del Duca from June 29-October 13, 2024, organized by the City of Senigallia with the support of Regione Marche, the collaboration of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio and the Marone Collection, and will feature works by the likes of Luigi Ghirri, Mimmo Jodice, Franco Fontana, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Martin Parr and many others. The project was born thanks to the curator’s collaboration with Riccardo Marone: always a passionate and educated collector of contemporary art, over the past fifteen years Marone has decided to shift his interests more and more toward the world of photography, traveling and documenting himself among exhibitions and fairs not only in Italy. Marone’s collection is distinguished by the tastes of its creator, who chooses only works that really caught his interest, preferring in recent years postwar photography with an eye to the so-called minors, photographers who for did not achieve the success they would have deserved but who created photographic circles of great historical relevance such as the Bussola group from which the Misa Group was later born, thanks to Giuseppe Cavalli and Mario Giacomelli. From these interests comes the involvement of Senigallia City of Photography for this exhibition that displays about 80 works, almost all made in analog and very few in digital, dating from the last hundred years, in black and white and color, both small and large format. The chosen theme is the sea, analyzed in its many iconographic nuances, a transversal theme that manages to unite the Marche city known above all for its beach, with the origins of Riccardo Marone who, born and raised in a house overlooking the Gulf of Naples, has always had the sea in his eyes and thoughts.

The exhibition opens with a large diptych by Angelo Antolino that immortalizes the containers of the port of Naples and that frames from the very beginning and where the theme of the sea is investigated in its many versions; the sea as a workplace is also in the photographs of Carlo Bevilacqua, Renzo Tortelli and Luciano D’Alessandro, who make true reportages of social denunciation. There is no shortage of shots by great masters such as Gianni Berengo Gardin with the famous image of the car parked on the beach in England from which two elderly people look at the sea; Nino Migliori with his famous plunge; the sea becomes lyrical and poetic in the shots of Mimmo Jodice, while the color photographs of the seas by Franco Fontana recall pictorial abstractions; unfailing are the bold and ingenious compositions of Luigi Ghirri. Among the most important photographs in the exhibition are a large print by Helmut Newton with twelve images of a nude woman moving along the seashore; Henri Cartier-Bresson is present with the shot in India in which people from behind look toward the mountain beyond the water; foreign photographers include Lehnert & Landrock who in the 1910s made postcard-perfect Italian views like the one on display, while the younger generation is represented by Martin Parr and his famous woman sunbathing in blue plastic goggles. An important section of the exhibition features images of female nudity on the seashore with works by Lucien Clergue, Edwin Bower Hesser and Ettore Sottsass Jr. among others, as well as two shots dedicated to Marilyn Monroe. Representing a less authorial and more pop genre of photography is James Andanson’s shot of Giovanni Agnelli diving from his boat in 1997. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog published by Nomos Edizioni.

The exhibition aims to tell the story of the Maroni collection and address the theme of the sea not only as an aesthetic expedient but that, as curator Angela Madesani says, “This is an exhibition with a double significance. The first is related to the historical-collectionist sphere, the second, of iconographic matrix, is related to the history of photography.”

“When I was asked to do this exhibition, I found it a beautiful initiative, because the sea has been at the center of many photographs in my collection, and we have selected a good number of them, which I think are very representative of my collection,” says Riccardo Marone “The sea can only be a moment of great inspiration; the sea is travel, it is tranquility, it is dream. But photographing the sea is also very complex and difficult, because photographing beauty is always difficult; the postcard effect is constantly lurking, so only great artists can achieve its essence.”

“Thanks to the Collection of Rita and Riccardo Marone,” commented Senigallia Mayor Massimo Olivetti and Deputy Mayor and Councillor for Culture Riccardo Pizzi, “we have the opportunity to host in Senigallia some of the protagonists of the history of photography and the history of contemporary art. Shots of rare beauty that show us different facets of the sea, a fundamental element in the history and economies of our City.”

Senigallia recounts the sea in exhibition dedicated to Marone collection

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