Exhibition: Guido Guidi – PHOTOGRAPHIC VISIONS OF MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE

Opening: 27.3.2019, 19:00
Curated by: Sabine Gamper
With:
Gennaro Postiglione, professor of Achitetecure at Politecnico di Milano and coordinator of “The Atlantic Wall Linear Museum”
Guido Pietropoli, architect, collaborator of Carlo Scarpa from 1970 to 1978 and his assistant at IUAV
Exhibition: 28.3. – 4.5.2019

Born 1941, in Cesena, Italy, Guido Guidi is a renowned pioneering photographer of European architecture and landscapes. Influenced by Neo-Realism and Concept Art, he has focused since the 1970s primarily on marginalized spaces, those locations, landscapes and architectures on the periphery to which we generally pay little attention. In his photographs he gathers traces of the past and present, and his work speaks thus of shifts inscribed in our realities by time as well as of metamorphoses wrought in cities and landscapes by human intervention. Through the medium of photography he articulates in such settings a visual idiom that reflects our ways of seeing by scrutinising the changeability and sensitivity of our personal perceptions.

In numerous photographic series since the 1980s Guido Guidi has documented Brutalism in modern architecture. foto-forum has selected works from three of these for the present exhibition: from “The Atlantic Wall” (2005), a comprehensive record of one of the last major twentieth-century lines of defence, the bunkers built in the period 1941–44 by the German forces of occupation on the Atlantic Coast of northern Europe: an innovative series, in photographic terms, as well as an example of research into the history of architecture. Further, the exhibition presents a photo series from 2003 of the sole industrial design ever realised by the maestro of modern architecture, Le Corbusier: the Claude-et-Duval factory built in France in 1951. And finally, there is a selection of photographs from the project “Brion Cemetery, 1996–2006”, for which Guido Guidi portrayed over a ten-year period the family tomb of the industrialist Giuseppe Brion, an architectural masterpiece created from 1970 to 1978 by Carlo Scarpa, as an addition to the San Vito cemetery in Altivole in the province of Treviso.

These photographic series attest the artist’s rigorous, clear and unsentimental regard for works of modern architecture yet are simultaneously highly poetic. Mementos of the passage of time, they draw our attention to the fleeting and ephemeral, documenting through their sequentiality the shifts in light, changes in colour and lengthening of shadows that occur in the course of a day or over seasons; and the objects thus portrayed gain a unique monumentality and timelessness. The works may be read therefore as emblems of Guido Guidi’s profound understanding of the interplay between architecture and landscape, the past and the present, fragile transience and lofty claims to a world without end.

opening images