13 October 2015
Over a hundred images covering the many phases in the career of Olivo Barbieri, in a continual probing of the relationship between vision and its representation. Real landscape and imagined space have always coexisted in his works: starting out from the pictures of old pinball machines taken at the end of the seventies, micro-worlds preserving fragments of the collective imagination, and passing through his journeys to the East in search of metropolises undergoing continual transformation. Then the aerial views that turn cities into enormous models through the device of selective focus. Or the large prints of paintings made using the same technique, in a rediscovery of some of the cornerstones of the history of Italian art. “I believe my work begins where photography ends,” Barbieri has said, and he has always used the medium not to document, but to enrich and transform our sense of the places in which we live.
Olivo Barbieri. Images 1978-2014
MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo
Curated by Francesca Fabiani
Rome
May 29, 2015 > January 3, 2016
© Olivo Barbieri, Pellestrina, Venice, 1988.
© Olivo Barbieri, Uffizi, 2002.
© Olivo Barbieri, Lhasa, 2000.
© Olivo Barbieri, Linyi, China, 2001.
© Olivo Barbieri, Site-specific Roma.
© Olivo Barbieri, Site-specific Houston.
© Olivo Barbieri, Site-specific Las Vegas.
© Olivo Barbieri, Beijing, China, 2001.
© Olivo Barbieri, Capri, 2013.
© Olivo Barbieri, Lugo, Ravenna, 1982.
© Olivo Barbieri, Flippers, 1977-78.