Kept for decades in the archives of the ceramic company Marazzi, an unpublished nucleus of photographs by Luigi Ghirri becomes the protagonist of an exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale in Sassuolo. For the first time, the recently refurbished spaces of the Appartamento dei Giganti open to the public telling the story of the meeting between the Emilian photographer and the company and their collaboration born in Sassuolo in 1975. An extraordinary story of research, creativity and link with the territory of which the Estensi Galleries, loved by Ghirri, embody the history and beauty.
Born in Scandiano in 1943 but moved to Sassuolo when he was three years old, Luigi Ghirri meets here, in this area between Modena and Reggio Emilia, for the first time Marazzi, a ceramic company founded in the 1930s. In 1975 the photographer crossed the threshold of the company for the first time: it was in a phase of growth and experimentation that he met and conversed with the research and development management of Marazzi in
those years, focused on some fundamental junctions such as color, size, internationalization. A unique partnership was born, in terms of duration, depth and results, between Ghirri and Marazzi for which the artist created - also involving John Batho, Cuchi White and Charles Traub - a research project in which ceramic is freely read as a surface and mental space, infinite possibilities of composition, light and color.
In ten years Ghirri created an important corpus of works for Marazzi, almost completely free from the canons of the advertising image and extremely coherent with the artistic and visual research and the themes dear to the photographer in those years: the surface, the common object, the project, the landscape, the light as genius loci.
Works that from 16 September to 31 October 2021 are the protagonists of the Luigi Ghirri exhibition. The Marazzi Years 1975 - 1985, curated by Ilaria Campioli, at the Palazzo Ducale in Sassuolo: an exhibition project created by the Estensi Galleries in collaboration with the Luigi Ghirri Archive and Marazzi Group, and proposed on the occasion of the 21st edition of the Filoso Festival in di Modena Carpi and Sassuolo whose theme, Freedom, well represents the spirit of the long collaboration between the artist and the company.
“With the exhibition we celebrate a little known but very fascinating aspect of the work of Luigi Ghirri, who was the reference personality of the Italian photographer of the second half of the twentieth century" - declares Martina Bagnoli, Director of the Estensi Galleries.