MARIO DE BIASI. Fotografie 1947-2003
Casa dei Tre Oci, Venezia May 13, 2021 - January 09, 2022
The Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice presents the major retrospective “Mario De Biasi. Fotografie 1947-2003,” devoted to Mario De Biasi, one of the greatest ever Italian photographers and an untiring storyteller of the world. The event, which reviews the photojournalist's complete oeuvre, from his debut when he began collaborating with the magazine Epoca all the way to his final work, initially scheduled from March 12 to July 31, 2021, will be open to the public from May 13, 2021 to January 9, 2022.
The exhibition is curated by Enrica Viganò in collaboration with the Archivio Mario De Biasi, organized by Civita Tre Venezie with Admira and promoted by the Fondazione di Venezia.
The result of in-depth research at the De Biasi Archive, the exhibition includes 256 photographs, half of which never seen before as well as vintage pictures, and proceeds diachronically by theme divided into ten macro sections that also include great historical events, exotic travels, portraits of famous and powerful people, scenes from everyday life, anonymous faces, veering toward the conceptual and the abstract. “It was about time! – remarks the curator Enrica Viganò. The need was felt for an anthological exhibition to celebrate the many facets of Mario De Biasi's talent. The Neorealist amateur photographer, the photojournalist for
Epoca, a witness to history, the portraitist of celebrities, the explorer of worlds both near and far, the visual artist, the interpreter of Mother Nature, the compulsive and creative draftsman. All his work is an ode to life.” Among the many images never seen before, on display at the Casa dei Tre Oci is the entire sequence of De Biasi's most famous and perhaps most beloved photograph: Italians Turn Around, taken in 1954 for the popular weekly ‘fotoromanzo' magazine Bolero Film and chosen by Germano Celant as the defining image of his exhibition “The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In the image a splendid Moira Orfei all dressed in white strolls through the center of Milan attracting the gaze of a group of men. The 1950s is one of the exhibition's core periods, with images of Italy in ruins after the war, but where you can also perceive the desire to be reborn and to rebuild; the memorable views of New York; or the close-up views of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 under the bullet fire, one of them even hitting De Biasi, earning him the nickname Italiano Pazzo (Crazy Italian). These are the images “of a twentieth century that now seems distant, but that does not cease to arouse curiosity,” says Denis Curti, artistic director of the Casa dei Tre Oci.” Two incredible assignments took place in 1964, and bear witness to
De Biasi's stubbornness: one was in Siberia at a temperature of 65 degrees below zero, and the other amid tongues of lava as Mount Etna erupted. There are moments of lightness and intimacy as well, which De Biasi sought on all five continents, where he took pictures of people kissing, street barbers, lunch breaks, from London to Paris, from Rome to Vienna, from Cairo to Tehran, from Thailand to Brazil, and from Israel to Nepal. A special tribute is paid to the theme of the lunch break in a large-scale installation representing a globe on which 40 vintage photographs, small and very small, can be viewed, each of them linked to the place where they were taken. The idea is to express the sense of universality and the anthropological nature of Mario De Biasi's research, that of a photographer who succeeded in finding in a simple everyday gesture a strong sense of community between distant and different cultures. Also on display are the images of the Moon Landing, the artist's most famous shots of the Venice Film Festival, including ones of Brigitte Bardot, Fellini and Masina, Romy Schneider, Maria Callas; the countless trips, especially to Hong Kong, South America, and India. The last section centers on the photographer's love of nature and his interpretation of its shapes and signs in “visual poems” that veer toward the conceptual and the abstract.