The Bagatti Valsecchi Museum presents the first exhibition, held in Milan, dedicated to the late twentieth century Italian photographer Vasco Ascolini, entitled Metaphysical Visions. Vasco Ascolini meets Canova, Thorvaldsen and De Chirico, which will open to the public on 16 June 2023.

Renewing its dynamic imprint of a house that opens up to other collections, the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum proposes an interesting dialogue between its historical-artistic identity and the precious photographic collection of the Pasquale Battista Foundation. Vasco Ascolini's photographs will be placed in relation, forming a silent and unprecedented dialogue, with works from the past, such as small marble heads, plaster casts by Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen and paintings by Giorgio De Chirico, in an exhibition that aims to highlight the dialectic between ancient and contemporary, recreating in the museum rooms that metaphysical atmosphere pursued by the photographer from Reggio Emilia and aiming to extrapolate from the works on display an unprecedented component profoundly interconnected with the highest aesthetic expression and the trends imposed by some of the most influential icons of haute couture.

The Bagatti Valsecchi Museum and the Pasquale Battista Foundation, with the support of the Augusta Ratio SpA Group, SILGAS and K&L Gates, the patronage of the Lombardy Region, the Municipality of Milan and the Institut français of Milan, and in collaboration with the Academy of Belle Arti di Carrara, present from 16 June to 3 December 2023 the first Milanese exhibition dedicated to the photographer Vasco Ascolini entitled Visioni Metafisiche. Vasco Ascolini meets Canova, Thorvaldsen and De Chirico, edited by Antonio D'Amico and Luca Carnicelli.

The visit route winds inside the museum rooms where you can admire a selection of over seventy of Ascolini's most significant shots, dedicated to statuary elements, proposed as sculptural fragments that animate, with their immobility, desolate contexts. A theme dear to the artist since the early 1980s, when he began to immortalise isolated architecture suspended in time, characterized by metaphysical alienated spaces.