The Palazzina Mayer decorated by Saul Steinberg in the shots of Ugo Mulas: the exhibition in Turin

In 1961 Saul Steinberg produced an extraordinary graffiti decoration of the atrium of the Palazzina Mayer in Milan, commissioned by Studio BBPR, which was overseeing its renovation. It was an important work, which followed other similar undertakings accomplished by the great draftsman and illustrator in the United States during the previous decade.

When the work was completed, Steinberg asked a young Ugo Mulas to witness the work, in its entirety and in detail. To aid the photographer in his work, the artist also drafts a short text explaining the iconography and meaning of his work, a reflection on the labyrinth starting with the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan, the city in which Steinberg had lived before the war. In 1997 the building would be renovated again, and the graffiti destroyed: today, only Ugo Mulas’ photographs remain of that splendid intervention, capable of restoring both the document of the work and its interpretation.

The exhibition Ugo Mulas / Saul Steinberg’s Graffiti in Milan, curated by the Ugo Mulas Archive and Walter Guadagnini, is on display in CAMERA’s Project Room until April 14, 2024, and recounts that event, re-proposing to scale the entire decoration from Mulas’ photographs. A selection of about fifteen photographs-some vintage others printed for this occasion-allow us to enter deeply into the work of these two great representatives of 20th-century art, to appreciate the iconographic imagination of Steinbergian and the poetic lucidity of Mulas’ eye.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a volume published by Dario Cimorelli Editore, edited by Dario Borso, author of the critical text and research that enabled the reconstruction of this singular episode in postwar Italian culture, containing Mulas’ images and the typescript sent by Steinberg to the photographer.

For all information, you can visit the official CAMERA website.

Pictured: Saul Steinberg, Palazzina Mayer, Milan, 1962. Ugo Mulas photographs © Eredi Ugo Mulas. All rights reserved. Courtesy Archivio Ugo Mulas, Milan - Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan/Naples.

The Palazzina Mayer decorated by Saul Steinberg in the shots of Ugo Mulas: the exhibition in Turin

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