Ugo Nespolo's New York photographs are on display at the Reggia di Colorno.

From January 21 to April 11, 2023, the Reggia di Colorno will host a major exhibition dedicated to the New York photographs of Ugo Nespolo, following the program that includes reviews in which the experiences of both authors, Italian and international, who have adopted photography as their elective language and artists who, while not having an exclusive relationship with the photographic image, felt it important to use it to communicate what they intended to express are exhibited. The latter is precisely the case of Ugo Nespolo, painter and artist, explorer of every expressive medium (among which one cannot forget cinema and what is often summarily called “applied art”), who presents at the Reggia the photographs he took in New York during the 1980s and 1990s, as part of the exhibition Ugo Nespolo. Wanderer about New York.

Nespolo is in New York as early as the 1960s:America is a myth and Ugo travels there on low-cost airline flights, crossing the United States on a Greyhound lines bus (when with $200 you could travel anywhere for a month). Nespolo feels that there are many things there that interest him, including Pop culture. Since then, he returns several times to the United States; a close friend of George Litto, a film producer and talent scout, he stays for months on the sets of films by Robert Altman and Brian De Palma. As early as the 1980s, he lives in New York, assiduously frequenting the Village; he buys a house in front of the Twin Towers.

The forty photographs on display in Colorno, chosen from the hundreds in his archive, were taken by Nespolo between 1981 and 1997 in the Big Apple. Almost every day he “wanders” for a few hours in the caverns and streets of New York City, especially in Manhattan, and fixes with a small Leica what strikes him, particularly the graffiti that begins to appear on walls, store windows, and the interiors of galleries and museums (images that would later transit into his paintings). New York City was experiencing the explosion of graffiti art at the time: self-taught authors who considered themselves artists, imbued with ghetto culture; Nespolo met Rammelzee and Keith Haring, who drew in the subways, and admired Richard Hambleton, the “master of menace,” as he was called for his eerie black shadows. New York is at the time an extraordinary place, full of ferment and tension: Nespolo loves jazz, frequents nightclubs, such as the Palladium; it is natural for him to immerse himself, always accompanied by the Leica, in that changing world, including through the migration of activities (starting with art galleries) from one neighborhood to another.

Nespolo’s photographs exhibited in the Reggia di Colorno document those mythical years in New York and, the choice of subjects and shots he made at the time help to understand some of the roots of his own activity as a painter.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Skira, which reprints the presentation by Furio Colombo for the solo exhibition held by Nespolo in New York in 1983-many of the paintings presented on the occasion are explicitly linked to photographs of shop windows and interiors-and a text and interview with Nespolo by Sandro Parmiggiani, curator of the exhibition at the Reggia di Colorno, in addition to the forty photographs that make up the exhibition.

Ugo Nespolo's New York photographs are on display at the Reggia di Colorno.

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