Venice: Palazzo Franchetti – Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti - Franco Fontana – Full Color exhibition

 Copyright Franco Fontana

Venice: Palazzo Franchetti – Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti - Franco Fontana – Full Color exhibition. Franco Fontana’s Full Color exhbition, until May 18, is his first major retrospective in Venice,  with more than 130 photographs, tells the story of this universally renowned photographer.  The exhibition at, and sponsored by and at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti at Palazzo Franchetti on the Grand Canal was curated by Denis Curti.  Bright colors, vibrant so as to appear unreal. Compositions punctuated by lines and planes overlapping geometries built on light.

Above. Franco Fontana - Los Angeles 2001.

Copyright Franco Fontana

Franco Fontana – Full Color. Hyperreal landscapes, more real than reality itself, surreal, suspended,  and often impossible. Deceptive proportions in which there is no room for man. Human figures revealed in the negative, sublimated into long shadows. Presence and absence simultaneously. Bodies as landscapes, hills and plains and contours anthropomorphic.These are the traits that lead immediately and unequivocally to the visual language of Franco Fontana.

Above. Franco Fontana – Puglia 1987.

 Copyright Franco Fontana

Franco Fontana – New York 1986

Franco Fontana 

Basilicata 1975 – Basilicata - 1978 – Cortina 1978

Puglia 1987 – Basilicata 1986 – White Sand, New Mexico 1983

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Venice: Spring at Palazzo Fortuny - Part I: Dora Maar - Ritsue Mishima - Barbara Paganin

Venice: Spring at Palazzo Fortuny.   The Spring at Palazzo Fortuny until July 14, brings together five exhibitions by talented women artists: Dora Maar’s Notwithstanding Picasso – Ritsue Mishima’s Tras Forma – Barbara Paganin’s Open Memory – Anne-Karin Furunes’s Shadows and The Amazons of Photography from the Collection of Mario Trevisan.

Venice: Spring at Palazzo Fortuny – Part I: Dora Maar – Notwithstanding Picasso.    Henrietta Theodora Markovitch better known as Dora Maar (1907-1997) was a beautiful French photographer, poet and painter of Croatian descent, best known for being a lover and muse of Pablo Picasso.

 Photo by Xavier Grandsart - courtesy Fortuny Museum

Dora Maar – Notwithstanding Picasso. A woman of rare beauty and enigmatic personality who had seduced Picasso, the leading painter of the century and, subsequently abandoned, had sunk into madness, living cut off from the world for the remaining fifty years of her life. “Sacrificed to the Minotaur”, “Segregated with her musty phantoms”, “Dora, painted tears” were some of the titles in the newspapers when her goods were cold at auction after her death.

Above. Man Ray - Portrait de Dora Maar (solarisation), 1936, silver bromide gelatin print.

photograph  and copyright by manfredi bellati

Dora Maar – Notwithstanding Picasso. Dora Maar was an extraordinary artist in her own right.  This exhibition aims to highlight her singular talent and is the first show to be dedicated to her photography in Italy. Thanks to loans from important museums and private collections, the exhibition, comprising over one hundred works, including some unpublished ones of great interest, examines her career and personality.

Above. Dora Maar – Vieille Femme et Enfant (dit Le Pisseur) – 1935c., vintage silver bromide gelatin print.

The Dora Maar exhibition is a project by, as well as, the layout of Daniela Ferretti.

Dora Maar – Notwithstanding Picasso. Dora had a multi-faceted personality as well as being a great photographer.

Above. Dora Maar – Homme sur un Trottoir, Trappe de Visite, 1935c. vintage silver gelatin print.

The curator of the exhibition Victoria Combalía, a scholar who has dedicated much time to studying Maar.

Dora Maar, by SIAE 2013 - photo credit:  photographic archives Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid – courtesy Palazzo Fortuny

Dora Maar - Picasso Debout Travaillant à Guernica dans son Atelier des Grands-Augustins, 1937,silver gelatin print.

Dora Maar – Notwithstanding Picasso. Dora was certainly a complex and tormented woman as portrayed in Picasso’s pictures, but also acute, intelligent and politically involved.

Above. Pablo Picasso, Tete de Femme (Dora Maar), 1939, oil on canvas.

 

Spring at Palazzo Fortuny: Ritsue Mishima – Tras Forma. Artist Ritsue Mishima (1962) draws stimuli for her work from natural forms and reflections of light: her glass is transparent, colorless, and conveys a sense of purity and luminosity, capturing and expanding the light and colors its surroundings. This exhibition presents her latest creations, the result of a careful analysis of the modus operandi of Mariano Fortuny.

Above. Ritsue Mishima – Titano, 2013, glass.

 photograph  and copyright by manfredi bellati

 

Artist Mirco Marchelli

Ritsue Mishima – Tras Forma. The artist pays close attention to the space in which she places her works; the play of transparency and of reflections produces infinite visual variations for the subject. 

Above. Ketty Alvera with a sculpture by Ritsue Mishima.

 

Ritsue Mishima – Tras Forma. The thousand-year-old tradition of making glass in Venice, seen through the lens of Mishima’s Japanese culture, results in works forming a highly contemporary alphabet. 

Above. Ritsue Mishima – Melograni, 2013, glass.

  photograph  and copyright by manfredi bellati

Spring at Palazzo Fortuny: Barbara Paganin – Open Memory. Venetian artist Barbara Paganin’s exhibition presents jewels and stories that draw their inspiration from the emotions of their past.  Tangible elements of borrowed memories: 19th-century miniatures, porcelain animal, good-luck charms, depicting mice, hippopotamuses, rabbits, ivory elephants, a little compass, the queen from a chess set… This is the first time the artist has chosen to include “extraneous” elements and objets trouvés in her work. Her work begins with a search among the antiques shops of Venice to find these little objects, which one could imagine were once jealously guarded in some child’s “treasure casket”.

Above. Barbara Paganin and one of the 25 brooches from Open Memory display. 

 

Photograph by Alice Pavesi Fiori, courtesy Palazzo Fortuny

Barbara Paganin – Open Memory. This is the first time the artist has chosen to include “extraneous” elements and objets trouvés in her work. Her work begins with a search among the antiques shops of Venice to find these little objects, which one could imagine were once jealously guarded in some child’s “treasure casket”.

Above. Barbara Paganin - 
Open Memory n.24, 2011-2013.

photograph and copyright by manfredi bellati

Barbara Paganin – Open Memory. Every brooch tells a story, which can be imagined differently by every observer, adapting it to his own memory. There is no single key to interpret it, but instead a different one for every “reader” of this album of memories composed chapter by chapter. The twenty-five works are planned as a single corpus, on which Paganin has worked continuously over the past two years, and are designed to be displayed all together for the first time at Palazzo Fortuny.

Above. Barbara Paganin - 
Open Memory, 2011-2013.

 

Curator of the Open Memory exhibition Valeria Accornero.

 

 

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Venice: Spring at Palazzo Fortuny - Part II - Anne-Karin Furunes - Amazons of Photography

photograph  and copyright by manfredi bellati

Spring at Palazzo Fortuny – Part II – Anne-Karin Furunes – Shadows.  Anne-Karin Furunes – Shadows exhibition, until July 14, at Palazzo Fortuny is curated by Elena Povellato with an exhibition display by Daniela Ferretti.  The Norwegian artist’s large-scale portraits drawn from historic photographic archives are created by perforating canvas. At Palazzo Fortuny she had the opportunity to see the photo archives, getting closer to the world of Mariano Fortuny through the photographic documentation of his work, his life in the laboratory and the trips that took him to distant lands where he looked for new ideas for his research. The subjects used, were selected from the photographic portraits that Mariano had done of the people who populated the everyday life in Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, offering a contemporary light to the silent shadows evoked from the last century.

Above. Anne-Karin Furunes – Crystal Images VIII, 2013, Archivio Fortuny1903, painted and perforated canvas.

The Norwegian artist Anne-Karin Furnues and curator Elena Povellato, in the background Anne-Karin Furunes – Crystal Images V, 2013, Archivio Fortuny 1895c, painted and perforated canvas.

Anne-Karin Furunes – Shadows. Every art work by the Norwegian artist lives through the light that touches it; a beam of light can illuminate but also darken the image that then is slowly set before our eyes as light moves through the thousands of holes that cover every canvas.

Above. Anne-Karin Furunes – Crystal Images III, 2013, Archivio Fortuny 1895c., painted and perforated canvas.

Kalle Eriksson

photograph  and copyright by manfredi bellati

From the Fortuny Museum archives ladies busts in various materials.

                                             photograph  and copyright by manfredi bellati

Spring at Palazzo Fortuny – Part II – The Amazons of Photography from the Collection of Mario Trevisan. The Amazons of Photography from the Collection of Mario Trevisan, until July 14,  is curated by Italo Zannier. The exhibition presents a significant anthology of photographs, taken by women, from the late 19th century to the present day, offering a particular historic and linguistic overview of the medium thanks to the passion and careful research of collector Mario Trevisan.

Above. Collector Mario Trevisan.

The Amazons of Photography from the Collection of Mario Trevisan.The selection opens with two portraits by Julia M. Cameron, and continues between the 1920s and 1940s with the work of two Austrian photographers, Trude Fleischmann and Madame D’Ora, of the American Margeret Bourke White, the Hungarian Ghitta Carell, the English Eva Barrett and two Germans, Ruth Bernhard and Leni Riefenstahl, the Italians Silvia Camporesi, Sabrina Mezzaqui and Giusy Calia.

Above. Silvia Camporesi – Studio per Ofelia – 2004/2010 – diptych, lambda print.

The Amazons of Photography from the Collection of Mario Trevisan.  Also on display are photographs by Dora Maar and Lisette Model, an Austrian of Jewish extraction who moved to the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War, where she opened a famous school of photography.

Above. Piergiorgio Coin next to a photograph by Lisette Model - Running Legs, N.Y.C., 1940, gelatin silver print.

Photograph courtesy Fortuny Museum

Giusy Calia - 
Attraverso lo Specchio 
- 2011- analogical double-exposure photograph

Sabrina Mezzaqui – L’Ombra delle Cose – 2012 – print on cotton paper

Franca Coin, Agatha Ruiz de la Prada and Tiziana Agostini

Barbara Foscari

Cristina Beltrami and Luca Bombassei

Isabella Casa Palumbo Fossati

The chimneys from the windows of Palazzo Fortuny.

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