Exhibitions
Antonioni and Ghirri: the mountain as visual thought at La Virreina Center de la Imatge
An exhibition curated by Frederic Montornés that puts the Italian filmmaker and photographer in dialogue, exploring the relationship between image, landscape and contemplation through an open and poetic visual essay.
From Trinh T. Minh-ha to Paloma Polo, with a stop at The Analogous Mountain by Michelangelo Antonioni and Luigi Ghirri, at the Virreina Image Center. A new temporary exhibition that can be visited until February 15th and that presents pictorial collages about mountains in dialogue with Ghirri's conceptual photographs.
Curated by Frederic Montornés —who came into contact with Antonioni's universe in the 1980s in Grenoble—, the exhibition has been conceived as an open, never-ending visual essay, starting from an initial premise: Antonioni and Ghirri never met. These mountains and landscapes are articulated through the images, becoming flickers of minimal gestures, expanded as a form of thought, an invitation to reflection.
Two perspectives that dialogue and complement each other in the search for a formal, conceptual and emotional unity. The exhibition takes as its starting point a series of mountains inspired by Blow-Up, born from the combination of a manual and technical process, and the inevitable intervention of chance. In this meeting space, the images invite the viewer to stop, to observe calmly and to enter a visual journey that connects the cinematic language of Michelangelo Antonioni (Ferrara, 1912 – Rome, 2007) with the poetic and conceptual gaze of the photographer Luigi Ghirri (Scandiano, 1943 – Roncocesi, 1992).
Antonioni and Ghirri, born thirty-one years apart in two different cities in the same region of northern Italy, separated by just over a hundred kilometers of road and by mountains with an average height of no more than 500 meters, are two artists who, despite never having met, forged their gazes on the plains. They were formed in the contemplation of extensive fluvial and alluvial spaces, and they traced their conceptual and formal horizons freely transiting that foggy zone where thought and imagination meet.
Antioni's series of Enchanted Mountains was first shown in 1983 and is the first time it has been exhibited in Barcelona, however, it was exhibited at the Luis Seoane Foundation in A Coruña in 2010. In parallel with the exhibition inaugurated at La Virreina Center de la Imatge in Barcelona, a room book has been written that perfectly complements this journey through an exhibition that must be accessed, thought about images, contemplated, discovered and fixed on two artists with affinities within a visual essay that has not been seen in the city for a long time.
