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Alberto Giacometti riceve l’annuncio di aver vinto il Gran premio. XXXI Biennale Internazionale d’Arte, 1962, © estate Ugo Mulas
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The Scene in Italy and at the Venice Bienniales

GAM
via Magenta, 31
+39 011 4429610
Torino
Ugo Mulas.
the Art Scene
June, 26-
October 5, 2008

Acclaimed in Rome (MAXXI) and Milan (PAC) by the public and the press alike, this retrospective exhibition is dedicated to the works of photographer Ugo Mulas, one of the most-admired Italian photographers, from his early shots to his more radical works.

After Rome and Milan, Turin is be the third city to host and supplement the images that offer viewers the most extensive visual representation of Mulas’s photography, dedicated to and inspired by the contemporary art world, the fulcrum around which the artist’s work revolved and evolved. In fact, the Turin exhibition is enriched with a new chapter of the photographer’s production, consisting of a valuable selection of previously unedited colour images, shot alongside the black-and-white production, made available by the Mulas Archive and drawn from its considerable collection.

Colour
A series of 30 back-lit display cases has been expressly fitted out to present about 100 colour shots, which Mulas had never printed, to allow the viewer to enter the artist’s secret archive, as in a sort of wonder chamber.

The exhibition features the following sections:

The Venice Biennales
A selection of some of the most beautiful and evocative images of the Venice Biennales, which Mulas covered from 1954 to 1972, illustrates the course of his photo reportage work. This section forms the exhibition’s time continuum, as it introduces the different international art movements that emerged in this twenty year time span of his photographic activity.

The Portraits
A portrait gallery picturing the protagonists of the Italian art scene in those years: not only artists, but also critics, art dealers and art collectors. It presents Mulas’s portraiture in its different types: from reportage portraits (Adami, Manzoni, Giacometti) to studio portraits (De Chirico, Morandi, Giulio Carlo Argan, Peggy Guggenheim) and artistic portraits. This section features some “focuses” that explore and highlight the photographer’s close friendship and collaboration with some Italian artists like Burri, Ceroli, Fontana, Manzù, Pascali, Schifano and Twombly.

The Events
A selection of photographs that mark the transition from photo journalism to a personal investigation on photography and on its different representative means, in connection with the development of conceptual art and behaviour. From the Spoleto exhibit Sculture in città (1962) to Campo Urbano in Como (1969), from Vitalità del Negativo in Rome (1970) to the tenth anniversary of Nouveau Réalisme in Milan (1970).

New York: art and people 1964-1967
Attention to the new media and the interest in American photography as expressed by the works of Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander, bring Mulas to leave classic photo journalism behind. In these years he produces images that testify the changes in the vibrant New York art scene, with the purpose of exploring the artistic situation from the inside, from the happenings to the soirées in the artists’ studios. Mulas’s acquaintance with artists such as Duchamp, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Johns, Christo, Segal, Rosenquist, Dine, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg and Cage, encourages his critical attention on the uses of the photographic medium, anticipating his works from the late Sixties.

New research
1967-1969
In the late 1960s Mulas works on a more experimental approach to the photographic image, moving along various contexts of visual communication. He creates images that explore photography’s many expressive possibilities: such works are not intended for illustrated magazines, but they are to be collected in books and catalogues (Campo Urbano, Vitalità del Negativo, Calder, Melotti), in large scale contact sheets (Johns, Newman, Noland), in portfolios such as the photographic sequences of Fontana, Duchamp and Montale, or are realized for theatre productions like the set photos for Wozzeck and The Turn of the Screw.

Large formats, projections, solarizations and the iconographic use of contact sheets are all elements that Mulas takes from his own photographic practice, from pop art and new dada experimentations and from a careful interpretation of the history of photography, which, in this decade of radical changes, becomes for him a pivotal reference point. The crisis of photo journalism and the pursuit of new meanings for a language that, with the forthcoming of television, has lost its primary role as informative medium, lead Mulas to a deep critical analysis of photography itself.

The Verifiche series
Le Verifiche (Verifications) series (1970-1972) consists of a group of photographs that are the outcome of a radical and conceptual analysis of photography. They represent the most significant works of the artist’s last creative season. They make the most touching will of Mulas’s innermost explorations of photography, the medium, as reached through the artist’s thoughts and eyes.