‘Luigi Ghirri: Felicità’ at Thomas Dane Gallery proposes happiness not as a situation to be attained, however as a manner of inhabiting the world by means of pictures. This isn’t pleasure as spectacle or affirmation, however one thing quieter and extra exacting: the felicity of naming, noticing and holding issues in view with out exhausting them. Curated by Alessio Bolzoni and Luca Guadagnino, and unfolding throughout each of Thomas Dane’s Duke Avenue areas, the exhibition makes a persuasive case for Ghirri as one of the crucial lucid thinkers of images’s perceptual limits – and one among its most beneficiant practitioners.
The exhibition’s bodily cut up is just not incidental. Shifting between the 2 galleries seems like transferring between registers of wanting: from floor to house, from picture as object to picture as surroundings. Bolzoni and Guadagnino’s curatorial contact is intentionally mild, permitting Ghirri’s inner logic to emerge by means of juxtaposition reasonably than didactic framing. What outcomes is just not a survey, however a fastidiously calibrated rhythm – one which mirrors Ghirri’s personal conception of images as an open, elastic system reasonably than a sequence of definitive statements.
Luigi Ghirri, Verso la foce, 1988-89
(Picture credit score: © The Property of Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich and Madrid)
Luigi Ghirri, Bologna, Grizzana, 1989-90
(Picture credit score: © The Property of Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich and Madrid)
The images that anchor the primary house are small, restrained, nearly stubbornly unassuming. Works corresponding to Sassuolo, 1970 and the cluster of Modena pictures made between 1970 and 1973 seem to supply little or no at first look: fragments of partitions, signage, partial horizons, colors softened into chalky blues and muted reds. However this discount is exactly the purpose. Ghirri understood that fashionable landscapes – notably the Italian countryside – had turn into visually exhausted, over-coded by clichés and nostalgia. Moderately than making an attempt to revive a misplaced pastoral ideally suited, he selected to work from inside this representational void.
These early pictures function like a pared-down vocabulary of place. In Modena, 1971, an indication gestures past the body, pointing nowhere particularly. In one other Modena {photograph}, from 1972, a strip of sky presses in opposition to a flat airplane of color, collapsing depth into floor. The images refuse narrative decision; as a substitute, they ask the viewer to stick with the act of wanting itself. Happiness, right here, is just not revelation however consideration.
This emphasis on surfaces, maps and indicators establishes a logic that carries into the second Duke Avenue house, the place interiors and landscapes prolong the identical conceptual enquiry. Wallpapers photographed within the mid-Nineteen Seventies flatten rooms into graphic fields, turning home house into one other form of atlas. Partitions behave like pages; pictures turn into pictures of pictures. The boundary between internal and outer worlds – so central to Ghirri’s pondering – begins to dissolve.
Luigi Ghirri, Campogalliano, 1985
(Picture credit score: © The Property of Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich and Madrid)
Luigi Ghirri, Modena, 1971
(Picture credit score: © The Property of Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich and Madrid)
The later works convey this sensibility into the open air. In Capri, 1981 and Croce Bianca, Piacenza, 1984, color turns into extra luminous, however by no means expressive in a sentimental sense. The compositions are exact, nearly architectural, holding the viewer at a measured distance. Landscapes from the late Eighties: Campagna Emiliana, 1985-89, Marina di Ravenna, 1986, are neither celebratory nor elegiac. They refuse the acquainted drama of previous versus new, rural versus industrial. As an alternative, they current a world formed by coexistence, the place distinctions have misplaced their visible productiveness.
This curatorial resolution to skirt Ghirri’s most iconic pictures in favour of quieter, much less resolved works sharpens the exhibition’s thesis. ‘Felicità’ is just not about reclaiming panorama or reasserting images’s authority. It’s about recalibrating the gaze. Ghirri believed images ought to organise consideration reasonably than overwhelm it – providing a pause inside a world more and more ruled by pace, repetition and visible noise. His pictures don’t search to remodel actuality; they permit it to look, flippantly and with measure.
Seen right this moment, Ghirri’s work feels much less prophetic than obligatory. In a picture financial system pushed by extra and immediate legibility, ‘Felicità’ argues for one more mode of seeing: images as a manner of staying with issues, of accepting their partiality, of recognising that which means usually resides in what stays unresolved. Bolzoni and Guadagnino’s exhibition doesn’t current happiness as an final result, however as a situation of wanting – one grounded in silence, precision and the unconventional modesty of paying consideration.
Luigi Ghirri: Felicità is at Thomas Dane Gallery from 23 January to 11 April 2026, thomasdanegallery.com
Luigi Ghirri, Modena, 1972
(Picture credit score: © The Property of Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich and Madrid)
Luigi Ghirri, Modena, 1973
(Picture credit score: © The Property of Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich and Madrid)
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