LUIGI GHIRRI

“The most important lesson I received from Conceptual art consisted in the recording of simple and obvious things, and viewing them under a whole new light,” Ghirri wrote. The exhibition’s title refers to his innate understanding that images never come to us directly, that they are always encoded, seen through an unacknowledged lens and layers of meaning.

Keenly aware of a photograph’s ability to play with our perception of things we think we know, the work in the exhibition highlights Ghirri’s intentional yet subtle toying with found imagery. In Ghirri’s work, this can take the form of reflections, a glimpse of a vista through a fence, or uncanny advertising. In one work, a woman’s heavily made-up eyes stare out of a shop window. In another, what appears to be an Old Master painting has been transformed into a jigsaw puzzle.

Luigi Ghirri (1943–1992) spent his working life in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. Although he exhibited extensively in Italy during his lifetime, it is only since his untimely death at age 49 that his work has begun to be more widely appreciated. In 2010 Thomas Demand organized the acclaimed exhibition “La Carte d’Après Nature” around Ghirri’s photographs. His work was featured in the Venice Biennale in 2011 and 2013 and has been the subject of museum exhibitions in Rome, Turin, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Dublin in recent years. In 2018 the first major retrospective of his work at a museum outside of Italy opened at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, later traveling to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Jeu de Paume in Paris.