During the Turin Photo week and on the occasion of Fo.To. 2019, Mazzoleni presents MASSIMO VITALI: Picnic Allée, second edition of the WINDOWS format.
The 'WINDOWS' series is a concept solo show that can be observed by one of the windows of Mazzoleni Turin, in Via Cernaia, 1.
Picnic Allée represents the image that captures the incredible picnic that took place on 14 July 2000 across the Paris Meridian, involving two million people all over France.
This exhibition is also an homage to the London Vitali’s solo show Short Stories: twelve of Vitali’s most outstanding photographs from different series are exhibited, where each singular image depicts a significant moment for Vitali–the artist’s ‘short stories’ of a long and distinguished career.
One of these–Picnic Allée–is presented in Turin in an unusual format that allows a unique visit: is a large latex print on pearl, 300 x 375 cm.
Vitali is internationally renowned for his large-scale colour images of beaches and mass leisure events. His distinctive panoramic views show people interacting with their environments and one another. His sweeping panoramas, crowded plazas, even discotheques, examine and portray the masses at leisure.
Fo.To Fotografi a Torino is a photographic kermesse that spreads all over the city. 2019 marks the second edition of the festival that is now counting 91 participants among museums, galleries, institutions, libraries, independent photo studios and no profit spaces, in order to create a real net of photograph shows in Turin.
MASSIMO VITALI: Picnic Allée will be visible 24/7 from Mazzoleni’s window in Via Cernaia 1, until 16 June.
Massimo Vitali (Como, Italy, 194). He moved to London after high school, where he studied Photography at the London College of Printing. In the early Sixties, he started working as a photojournalist, collaborating with many magazines and agencies in Italy and in Europe. It was during this time that he met Simon Guttmann, founder of the agency Report, who was to become fundamental in Massimo’s growth as a 'Concerned Photographer'. At the beginning of the Eighties a growing mistrust in the belief that photography had an absolute capacity to reproduce the subtleties of reality led to a change in his career path. Vitali began working as a cinematographer for television and cinema. However, his relationship with the still camera never ceased, and he eventually turned his attention back to 'photography as a means for artistic research'. Vitali’s series of Italian beach panoramas began in the light of drastic political changes in Italy. He started to observe his fellow countrymen very carefully. Vitali depicted a 'sanitised, complacent view of Italian normalities', at the same time revealing 'the inner conditions and disturbances of normality: its cosmetic fakery, sexual innuendo, commodified leisure, deluded sense of affluence, and rigid conformism'. [Whitney Davis, 'How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age' in October Magazine, Summer 2006, no.117, p.71—98.] Over the past 12 years he has developed a new approach to portraying the world, illuminating the apotheosis of the Herd, expressing and commenting through the most intriguing, palpable forms of contemporary art–Photography.
Press release courtesy Mazzoleni.
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