Florence, Villa Bardini showcases the works of Olivo Barbieri, master of photography

A constant invitation to question the contradictions of the modern world through landscape images, in which natural and artificial, human and metamorphic dialogue: this is the aim of the photographs by Olivo Barbieri (Carpi, 1954), on view at Villa Bardini in Florence from Nov. 7, 2023 to Feb. 11, 2024. The works of Barbieri, one of the great masters of contemporary Italian photography, take the visitor on a journey to the edge between destruction and remaking, through a society governed now by euphoria and the unexpected, domination and unruliness, and now subjected to anonymity and an increasingly dehumanized economy and science. Villa Bardini is hosting a new exhibition entitled Olivo Barbieri. Pensieri Diversi, curated by Marco Pierini, with scientific coordination by Alessandro Sarteanesi, promoted by Fondazione CR Firenze with Fondazione Parchi Monumentali Bardini e Peyron in collaboration with Mainz.

An exhibition with a retrospective character, in which a selection of about 50 works by Olivo Barbieri, dating along a twenty-year time span and including a group of precious unpublished works, is chosen as an extreme moment of reflection on a world in continuous and anguished transformation. The exhibition Different Thoughts is divided into nine moments: Detroit 2010, Tribunals 2000, Landfill 2013, Wet Market 2000, Shopping Centers on the Via Emilia 1999, site specific_ 2004 - 2017, Tibet 2000, ALPS GEOGRAPHIES AND PEOPLE 2012, Capri 2013. The artist borrows the title of one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s most famous volumes, Pensieri diversi, in which the philosopher, through a series of enunciations questions the various aspects of reality and the arts, declaring, as never before done elsewhere, his estrangement from a modern world founded on the cult of technique and progress, inviting instead an incessant questioning of what is “before our eyes.”

As in the words of curator Marco Pierini:"In the perfectly consequential selection of Pensieri Diversi Olivo Barbieri delivers to us an idea of landscape that never-even when the eye is stretched over the context of nature-is given as a canonical and unaltered paradigm, but on the contrary is configured as a space of our living, a place where wills, intentions, desires take shape and substance, when they do not precipitate by the excess of hybris."

Among the series on display, site specific_ repurposes a revisitation of iconic places in our history, while photographs of Shopping Centers portray a society neutralized in its need for security. And if the science-fiction imagery is preponderant in Alps and Capri’s works, which tend to personally reshape the image those places leave in our memory, the photographs dedicated to the Wet Market in Zhanjiang, China, take on an even more contingent significance today after the recent pandemic. As in the words of Andrea Cortellessa, taken from his conversation with Olivo Barbieri published in the exhibition catalog, “The world you show us is a ’plastic’ world. Not so much because it has a subtly ’artificial’ appearance; but because it is constantly in motion, caught up in a series of even contradictory processes of transformation. Another world is not only possible - you tell us with your work all along - but in fact it is already there; you just have to look at it. That is, to look at it in a certain way. The metamorphosis of the image actually depends on your gaze, on the procedures you adopt from time to time to achieve it; but in this way you show us the truly metamorphic aspect-even dramatically so, in some cases-of the reality around us.”

“It is a great opportunity for Villa Bardini,” says the President of the Fondazione Parchi Monumentali Bardini e Peyron, Jacopo Speranza, “to host this important exhibition that tackles a theme that has entered overwhelmingly into the news and into everyday debate such as the urban environment and its progressive transformation. It is also an opportunity to rethink the many meanings of ”our“ landscape that represents one of the country’s identity motifs. Barbieri’s artistic journey has marked an extraordinary season of Italian photography and his works scrutinize those places that in the past, were not worthy of being represented. A lucid and severe gaze that violently clashes with that vision of many ”postcard“ historic centers that are now part of our collective memory.”

Accompanying the exhibition event is a bilingual (Italian/English) volume published by Mainz, and edited by Marco Pierini and Alessandro Sarteanesi, with texts by Marco Pierini, Andrea Cortellessa and Olivo Barbieri, with a rich photographic apparatus, which will add to the selection of works exhibited at Villa Bardini, other images chosen by the artist, to complete the project.

Olivo Barbieri was born in Carpi(Modena) in 1954. With his images, the artist challenges the usual modes of representation to give life to new narratives. The coloristic alteration of artificial lighting, selective focus, overexposures or the use of renderings are just some of the tools of an active investigation into the form that man has given to the world and into the even paradoxical relationships between seemingly distant places.

Olivo Barbieri’s early photographic series focused on the subject of artificial lighting in European and Eastern cities. Since 1989 the artist has routinely traveled to the East, especially to China. He began exhibiting in 1978 with the project Flippers. In 1982, in Bari, he participated in Viaggio in Italia, a seminal exhibition for the history of European photography. In 1996 the Folkwang Museum in Essen dedicated a retrospective to him. Important publications include Virtual Truths(Silvana Editoriale, 2001), site specific_03 13(Aperture, New York, 2013), ERSATZ LIGHTS(Hatje Cantz, 2015), Mountains and Parks (Mainz, 2019). In 2015 MAXXI in Rome presents his first retrospective in Italy, Images 1978-2014. Two films from the series site specific_ became part of the collection of MoMA New York in 2017. More than fifty monographs and catalogs have been published on Olivo Barbieri’s work. Works by the artist can be found in museums and public and private art collections in Europe, Asia, and the United States.

For all information, you can visit the official website of Villa Bardini.

Pictured: Olivo Barbieri, Jatiparang Semarang, Indonesia, 2013

Florence, Villa Bardini showcases the works of Olivo Barbieri, master of photography

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