From 16 July to 22 October 2023, the MA*GA Museum in Gallarate (VA) presents Il Profilo dell'Immagine, a rearrangement project of the museum's collection, curated by Alessandro Castiglioni and Emma Zanella, respectively deputy director and director of MA*GA, with the aim of presenting the new acquisitions, obtained thanks to the assignment of two different public notices promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

With the PAC2021 - Plan for Contemporary Art, the MA*GA has acquired a collection of 25 works by Armin Linke and, thanks to Strategia Fotografia 2022, two works by Bruno di Bello and Paola di Bello enter the collection.

“The title of the exhibition – affirm the two curators – evokes the particular identity of the photographic language suspended between documentation and representation, its “infra-thin” nature, as defined by photography critic Elio Grazioli, the ambivalence between technical image and artistic image, questioning the public on the significance that the photographic image has had in our recent history and in our contemporaneity, since, using the words of the American critic David Levi Strauss, "photography, in theory, has always wanted to make the image democratic, but it has rarely worked that way.”

The research and exhibition project allows the collection of works related to the photographic languages of the MA*GA to be revealed to the public for the first time in its entirety, in which the new acquisitions are organically inserted.

The exhibition takes the form of a narration in which different episodes and authors alternate and follow one another, intertwining the research dedicated to the image and its fragmentation with authors such as Emilio Isgrò and Valentina Berardinone, to continue with the MEC Art of Gianni Bertini, Bruno di Bello and Aldo Tagliaferro, dialogue with visual poetry, mail art and performance with Mirella Bentivoglio, Maria Lai and Giuseppe Chiari up to the linguistic research of Franco Vaccari. The exhibition is completed by addressing the issue linked to the persistence of the landscape in the identities and non-identities of places with the works of Luigi Ghirri and Marina Ballo Charmet, up to the large cycles of photographic productions commissioned by the museum such as the Ex/post Orizzonti temporari project by Mario Grow and Multiplication by Armin Linke.

The exhibition itinerary is divided into three sections that analyze different attitudes and working methods around the image and photographic languages.

The first, Fragments of reality, analyzes those works created between the 60s and 70s in which the photographic image emerges as a fragment of reality, a transformed detail, extrapolated from its context and given a new meaning. Examples are the work of Emilio Isgrò, that of Franco Vaccari or the collages of Mirella Bentivoglio.

The second welcomes research dedicated instead to the idea of repetition, reproduction and multiplication, at the center of which is the work of Armin Linke.

The third is instead reserved for the idea of a photograph that investigates space as a language and moves in search of an elsewhere. This section opens with La Disparition by Paola Di Bello, which is flanked by the works of Maurizio Montagna, Mario Cresci, Francesco Bertocco and the installation by Marzia Migliora.