Cini Foundation and Marsilio Arte open The Rooms of Photography. And they open with Ugo Mulas

Inside the Giorgio Cini Foundation, in the Sale del Convitto (Boarding Rooms) on theIsland of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, a new exhibition and research center, Le Stanze della Fotografia(The Rooms of Photography), a joint initiative of Marsilio Arte and the Giorgio Cini Foundation, will open to the public on March 29, 2023, destined to continue the path begun in 2012 at the Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice, in the conviction that photography, among the most interesting artistic languages of the modern and contemporary, should continue to have its own specific “home” in Venice. To accompany the exhibition activities, a dedicated Foundation will support research projects thanks to the contribution of strategic partners Fondazione di Venezia and San Marco Group.

A natural association between photography and the Island of San Giorgio, as the Giorgio Cini Foundation holds one of the most important photographic collections in Europe. A valuable collection that over time has been enriched with a unique photographic capital in the field of art historical research: an immense documentary patrimony consisting of the photographic collections that have come to the Institute of Art History over time and belonged to important art historians, including Berenson, Bettini, Fiocco, Pallucchini, to journalists and writers, such as Ojetti, together with a conspicuous number of photographs produced by exchanges with other cultural institutions, by the relationships that have existed for several decades between Vittorio Cini, the Giorgio Cini Foundation and the Alinari company. A fellowship that contributed, until 1970, to the creation of the Photo Library, which, to date, counts almost a million photographs, freely consultable in the spaces of the Nuova Manica Lunga by scholars, researchers, enthusiasts, by appointment, but also online, thanks to the great effort that the Cini Foundation has undertaken since the early 2000s to digitize its heritage.

Conceived as a true international center for research and enhancement of photography and the culture of images, Le Stanze will offer, alongside the exhibitions in Venice and other Italian and foreign cities, laboratories, meetings, workshops, seminars with national and international photographers, and master’s degrees. With this in mind, several partnerships will be developed with the most important entities in the world of photography, such as the Magnum Photos agency, the Parisian Jeu de Paume center, the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie, and the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, to name a few.

The center can count on the creation of a dedicated Foundation, which will allow funding and support for research projects, where strategic partners such as the Venice Foundation, which has been committed to the enhancement of the photographic language since the purchase of the Casa dei Tre Oci in the 2000s and intends to promote the establishment of an annual Photography Prize aimed at young photographers, and San Marco Group, Italy’s leading professional building paints and varnishes manufacturer, will converge, confirming its strong link with the Tre Oci experience.

The artistic direction of Le Stanze della Fotografia is entrusted to Denis Curti. Research and exhibition activities are coordinated by the technical-scientific committee chaired by Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Giorgio Cini Foundation’s Institute of Art History, and composed of Emanuela Bassetti, president of Marsilio Arte; Chiara Casarin, cultural development and communications manager of the Giorgio Cini Foundation; artistic director Denis Curti; and Luca De Michelis, managing director of Marsilio Arte. Technical sponsors include Distilleria Nardini, Grafica Veneta, iGuzzini, and NeoTech.

“When we inaugurated Sabine Weiss’s exhibition a year ago,” commented Emanuela Bassetti, president of Marsilio Arte, “a review that concluded our experience at the Casa dei Tre Oci, we said that this would not mean the end of the Marsilio ’photography in Venice’ path, which went far beyond a building. A year later, with the Ugo Mulas exhibition, we are happy to inaugurate our new ’home’ on the Island of San Giorgio, launching in partnership with Fondazione Giorgio Cini an ambitious international cultural project of research and memory.” The Rooms of Photography will in fact open with an extensive retrospective dedicated to Ugo Mulas (Pozzolengo, 1928 - Milan, 1973), which will present for the first time an important selection of vintage images never exhibited before.

“Great attention has always been given by the Giorgio Cini Foundation to photography, both as an art form and as a historical and artistic documentation, so much so that it created, under the impulse of Vittorio Cini himself, what is now one of the richest photo libraries in Italy and Europe,” commented Giovanni Bazoli, president of the Giorgio Cini Foundation. “The opening of the Rooms of Photography here on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore therefore represents a new addition to the already wide and varied cultural offerings of the Cini Foundation.”

The former boarding school building that will house The Rooms of Photography, which consists of about 1850 square meters arranged on two levels, has been the subject of a major rearrangement and restoration work aimed at enlarging and enhancing the spaces, carried out by Studio di Architetti Pedron / La Tegola with the special participation of the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, which allowed the installation of light and movable walls that, like theatrical wings, will be remodeled for the different exhibition arrangements, with a view to the sustainability of the cultural enterprise. The bookshop, with a layout created by Paolo Lucchetta’s Retail Design studio, has been designed as a true bookstore and space for reception and meeting, and will offer a wide range of editorial offerings with specialized magazines, journals, essays, design articles and iconic objects. The building is located in the northeast area of the island of San Giorgio: for a long side it overlooks the fondamenta adjacent to the Darsena Grande; for a short side it overlooks the lagoon, visible from the inside thanks to two large and spectacular windows.

On the occasion of the opening of the Rooms of Photography, the exhibition Ugo Mulas will be open to the public from March 29 to August 6, 2023. The Photographic Operation, produced in collaboration with theMulas Archive and curated by Denis Curti and Alberto Salvadori, director of the Archive. The project coincides with the 50th anniversary of the death of the famous photographer. More than three hundred images will be exhibited, including thirty photos that have never before been exhibited, documents, books, publications, and films, with the intention of offering a synthesis capable of restoring a reading that is open to the different experiences faced by Ugo Mulas.

Among the most significant photographers of the post-World War II period, Mulas understands early on, as a self-taught photographer, that being a photographer means giving a critical testimony of society, and it is precisely this awareness that guides his first reportages between 1953 and 1954: the Milanese suburbs and the artistic and cultural environment of the early 1950s Bar Jamaica. Mulas quickly established himself in the most diverse areas of photography, from fashion to advertising, publishing in numerous magazines such as Settimo Giorno, Rivista Pirelli, Domus, and Vogue. During these years the photographer developed an important artistic collaboration with Giorgio Strehler, thanks to whom he published the photo chronicles L’opera da tre soldi (1961) and Schweyck in World War II (1962).

Attention to the art world and artistic production became one of Mulas’s main interests, as he photographed the editions of the Venice Biennale from 1954 to 1972. In 1962 he documented the exhibition Sculptures in the City in Spoleto, where he became particularly associated with the American sculptors David Smith and Alexander Calder. Also from this period is the series devoted to Eugenio Montale’s Ossi di Seppia collection (1962-1965). The summer of 1964 is significant for Mulas. At the Venice Biennale, American Pop Art is presented to the European public; the photographer obtains the collaboration of critic Alan Solomon and the support of art dealer Leo Castelli, who introduce him to the American art scene during his first trip to the United States. He thus portrays important painters at work.

Collaboration with Americans would continue in 1965 and later in 1967, when Mulas presented his analysis of work with artists by publishing the celebrated volume New York: art and people. The collaboration with Marcel Duchamp was also crucial.

To the formal and conceptual analysis of photography are dedicated Verifiche (1968-1972), a series of thirteen photographic works through which Mulas questions photography itself. The title of the Venetian exhibition takes its cue from one of the Verifiche.

The exhibition will be divided into fourteen sections covering all of Mulas’ fields of interest. From theater to fashion, with portraits of friends and personalities from literature, cinema and architecture photographed as “posed models,” from landscapes and cities to his experience with the Venice Biennale and Pop Art artists. One section will be devoted to Milan and the famous Bar Jamaica. “The Jamaica,” Denis Curti observes, “is the place of meetings, of complicit friendships, those with Mario Dondero, Piero Manzoni, Alfa Castalfi, Pietro Consagra, Carlo Bavagnoli and Antonia Buongiorno, who will become his wife. This section is followed by a chapter devoted to industrial projects and the most interesting experiences with Olivetti and Pirelli. Closing the itinerary, the most significant ’series’ for Mulas himself, those dedicated to Calder, Duchamp and the fundamental ’verifications,’ which are certainly to be considered as one of the most interesting ’critical thought experiments’ on photography.”

“The photographic work of Ugo Mulas,” says Alberto Salvadori, “offers an inescapable point of view on the status of the work of art itself, which prompts us to reflect on the relationship, each time new and peculiar, between the artist and his work space, inspiration and the context that expresses it. The extensive retrospective that inaugurates Le Stanze della Fotografia gives an account of this ever-present ’topicality’ of Mulas’ gaze, showing even lesser-known aspects of it through shots, archival documents, and videos that have never before been exhibited, and giving us back the portrait of a well-rounded artist, of his vision of twentieth-century art and culture.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Marsilio Arte.

The Rooms of Photography are already announcing their exhibition program: in autumn 2023 they will host an exhibition dedicated to Paolo Pellegrin (Rome, 1964), among the most important international contemporary photojournalists, while in spring 2024 it will be the turn of the retrospective Helmut Newton. Legacy, curated by Matthias Harder, director of the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin, and Denis Curti, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth.

Image: 3D rendering of the spaces of The Rooms of Photography. Credits © Studio APM

Cini Foundation and Marsilio Arte open The Rooms of Photography. And they open with Ugo Mulas

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