With Ugo Mulas, the “Rooms of Photography” make their debut in Venice

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A new center for photography in the lagoon. From the Casa dei Tre Oci to the Giudecca, to the “Rooms of Photography” within the Giorgio Cini Foundation: in Venice Marsilio Arte continues to believe in and invest in the art of photography and once again entrusts Denis Curti with the artistic direction of the new spaces exhibitions inaugurated on the island of San Giorgio.

The path started by Marsilio in 2012 right at the Casa dei Tre Oci (now owned by the Berggruen Institute) could not be interrupted: photography in Venice had to continue to have a dedicated place and the “Rooms” are the new home. Now, also thanks to strategic partners (Fondazione di Venezia and San Marco Group) the exhibition activities, research projects, laboratories, meetings and workshops dedicated to photography will be able to continue in the huge halls of the former boarding school on the island of San Giorgio , which overlook the lagoon, towards the Lido of Venice.

A perfect set, a stone’s throw from the “Rooms of Glass” dedicated by the Giorgio Cini Foundation to glass art, the “Rooms of Photography” were conceived as a flexible environment, set up with large mobile wings like a theatre, wooden walls they raise, lower, change the exhibition path from time to time according to needs.

Hugh Mulas

To inaugurate the new house of photography in the lagoon, Denis Curti wanted to propose one of the most important post-war figures on a world level: Ugo Mulas (1928 – 1973), the Italian photographer par excellence, the most studied, the best known, an artist who fifty years after his death is still to be discovered, capable of opening up new perspectives. “Ugo Mulas. The photographic operation” (which can be visited until 6 August 2023), was created in collaboration with the Mulas Archive and Alberto Salvadori, who is its director, worked side by side with Denis Curti to set up this grandiose anthology: 330 photographs exhibited, including more than fifty totally unpublished shots, together with vintage prints, documents, books and films that offer a suggestive synthesis of the different experiences faced by the photographer in his dazzling career.

The stages of the exhibition

The exhibition is divided into 14 thematic stages that want to tell who Ugo Mulas was, without flattening him on the stereotype of the “artists’ photographer”. Of course, a section is dedicated to portraits of Callas, Ungaretti, Montale, Giacometti, Calder, Rauchemberg, Pasolini, but Mulas deserves credit for having broken down photographic genres precisely because he has frequented them all: from theater to fashion, from art to jewellery, portraits, travel, landscape… A “total” photographer who had his strength in never focusing the camera in search of the perfect shot, but in paying attention to the photographic process that was triggered in front of the camera , in the dynamic between person and person or between men and architectures, and objects. Empathy is the key word: in the photos of the newspaper, at the famous Bar Jamaica, in the Milanese suburbs, in the portraits of artists, friends and writers, Mulas builds very strong and exclusive bonds. In agreement with Lucio Fontana he stages the gesture of cutting the canvas, shot after shot, to make the public understand the profound meaning of that revolutionary gesture: the entire sequence is on display in the exhibition. Other sections are dedicated to travel, theater and artistic collaboration with Giorgio Strehler; at the Venice Biennale, which Mulas followed from 1954 to 1972; to American Pop Art; the encounter-confrontation with what Mulas believed to be his master, Marcel Duchamp; up to the series of “Verifiche” (1968-1972), thirteen works through which Mulas questions himself about photography.