Luigi Ghirri: Felicità [Exhibition]

Thomas Dane Gallery in London presents Felicità, an exhibition of Italian artist Luigi Ghirri (b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Roncocesi, Italy), across the gallery’s two spaces on Duke Street, St James’s. Curated by Alessio Bolzoni and Luca Guadagnino, Felicità will be the second exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery dedicated to Ghirri’s work, following Luigi Ghirri: Colazione sull’Erba in 2019.

Friday 23 January - Saturday 11 April 

Thomas Dane Gallery 
11 Duke Street & 3 Duke Street, St James's
London SW1Y 6BN
United Kingdom

 
There have been over a hundred exhibitions of Luigi Ghirri’s photography; countless texts published about him; dozens written even by himself, on his own work, on what image-making can become. Many essays on his practice – including at least two of his own – start with the image of the whole world: The Blue Marble, taken for the first time from aboard the Apollo flight in 1972. The artist described being confronted by the thought that this image contained not only the entire world as we knew it, but also all images ever created of the world: the graffiti, frescoes, paintings, writings, photographs, books, films – an image to contain all images. Reading back his recollection now, it feels like witnessing someone confront the heart of modernity, someone writing from the brink of postmodernity. We can find ourselves today, standing at the brink of something yet unseen, asking the same question as did he: What of new can we possibly find here? Ghirri responds with images, with curiosity and the kind of self-awareness we recognise in the image-makers of today. And with this exhibition, curated by Alessio Bolzoni and Luca Guadagnino, we discover him not strictly as a photographer, but as an artist working with photography in the most conceptual and contemporary terms: of his time, yet precociously of the now.

About the book, Luigi Ghirri: Felicità

World-renowned director Luca Guadagnino and artist Alessio Bolzoni present an artfully curated sequence of unseen and iconic photographs and texts by Luigi Ghirri in this elegant volume. The book offers an idiosyncratic path through Ghirri’s works, moving from wry images of discarded magazine cuttings and details of materials to domestic spaces and images from Ghirri’s travels around his home country and beyond, saturated in colour and sunlight.