contessanally: Ca Giustinan - Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia - Un Diavolo Amico. Luca Massimo Barbero

Headquarters - La Biennale di Venezia

Ca' Giustinian

Un Diavolo Amico. Luca Massimo Barbero - Exhibition

On the Canal Grande in the headquarters of La Biennale di Venezia - Ca Giustinian - on show is the archive of critic, historian and curator of modern and contemporary art - Luca Massimo Barbero - the exhibition entitled - Luca Massimo Barbero. Un Diavolo Amico - will become part of the ever growing Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee della Biennale di Venezia. Barbero’s archive stands out as a living archive that is constantly expanding; it will be enriched with everything that its owner will produce in the future and that he himself will continue to use. It will also be a propositive archive that will inspire initiatives for the Biennale Archives themselves.

"To define Luca Massimo Barbero’s choice, I use the word ‘gesture’ in its broadest semantic meaning (movement, the expression of a feeling, an action motivated by profound reasons) because it clearly defeats the concept of an archive to which something is left for the sole purpose of conservation. In this case, something is left behind to increase its breathing capacity and grow within a context that can enhance it, making it available to the widest possible public”.

Roberto Cicutto

President of La Biennale di Venezia

Luca Massimo Barbero, Debora Rossi and Roberto Cicutto

The exhibition, introduced by a text of Nicolas Ballario - journalist and expert on contemporary art applied to media - presents a first tranche of materials from Luca Massimo Barbero’s archive, which will be exhibited on a rotating basis in the coming months. It is a sort of ‘coring’ that reveals the many aspects of his personality and methods of study and curatorship. Drawings, photographs, notes from his sketchbooks, storyboards, catalogues, objects, all bear witness to his forty-year curatorial practice, which distinguishes his professional career at an international level.

Debora Rossi, Nicholas Ballario, Roberto Cicutto and Luca Massimo Barbero

Sala Portego

The walls of the Portego at Ca’ Giustinian host a series of historic photographs from Cameraphoto that depict events at La Biennale di Venezia from 1948 to 1981: a collection of photographs that summarise the fundamentals of Barbero’s training and bear witness to his bond with the Venetian institution through his ample photo library.

Roy Lichtenstein - 1965 - Robert Rauschenberg -1975 - Jasper Johns - 1962

Robert Rauschenberg -1974 - Robert Rauschenberg -1975 -

Interior - U.S. ex-consulate Venice -1964

A sailor in front of a painting by Kenneth Noland

XXXII Biennale di Venezia -1964

Luca De Michelis and Cristiana Costanzo

Roberto Cicutto, Manuela Luca Dazio, Luca Massimo Barbero and

Emanuela Bassetti

Luca Cipolletti and David Tremlett

Sala Portego

Russian Pavilion - La Biennale di Venezia - 1960

Romolo Bazzoni, Rodolfo Pallucchini and Giovanni Ponti - 1948

A model in front of paintings by Giuseppe Capogrossi - 1962

Visitors - XXVI Biennale di Venezia - 1952

Sala Portego

Pablo Picasso - 1947/1948 - Rodolfo Pallucchini and Pablo Picasso

Palma Bucarelli - sculpture by Alberto Viani - XXIV La Biennale di Venezia - 1948

Henri Matisse - 1948 - Henry Moore - 1948 -

Henry Moore - XXIV La Biennale di Venezia - 1948

“I consider archives a cradle and I owe a great deal of my roots to La Biennale di Venezia, which I believe is a vital construction site for contemporary art. Ever since I was a student it has been a unique place that has given many of us the opportunity to study and learn, as I like to say, “travelling without moving”. I am very pleased with this opportunity because it allows me to give back and share my imagery, from cinema to art and photography, which has taken shape inside that same archive. At this historic moment when memory is being shortened, it has become vital to give La Biennale material that is anchored in the present and make documents available to scholars so they can be consulted in their original version”.

Luca Massimo Barbero

Maria Luisa Frisa and Mario Lupano

Manuela Luca Dazio

Mattia Berto

Luca Massimo Barbero and Karole Vail

Sala Mostre

The two rooms at the far ends the ends of the Portego display Luca Massimo Barbero's curatorial method and practice, in the almost obsessive attention he paid to the slightest detail in his exhibitions and publications, which shares the “originality” which has led him to be considered one of the most authoritative figures in art history today. The Sala Mostre presents several past exhibitions, from the one dedicated to Peter Greenaway at the Fortuny Museum in 1993, to a mosaic of images and materials relative to the installations of works by artists such as Lucio Fontana, Carla Accardi, Anthony Gormley, Shirin Neshat, Tomas Saraceno and Arcangelo Sassolino, organized from the 1990s to the present at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, at the Macro of Rome, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and at the Kunsthaus in Zurich.

Sala Mostre

Manfredi Bellati, Fabrizio Plessi and Manlio Brusatin

Fabio Pacifico, Cristiana Costanzo and Elisabetta Barisoni

Pamela Berry and Maria Grazia Rosin

“All these materials will resound through their vicinity to the present, in a place that is open to all, in contact with young people who can study and become acquainted with them and who knows, from students they might become scholars one day.”

Luca Massimo Barbero

Sala Bimbi

The room that has always been known as the Sala Bimbi - kid's room - presents a world that is known to very few, it depicts a man critics have defined “the art historian who hunts images”: a selection of sketches and drawings, texts and lectures from his work as a teacher at the Scuola Holden in Turin; a previously unknown Barbero, a photographer for the national Greco-Roman wrestling team; portraits from a decade-long photography project entitled Candidi Come Colombe Astuti Come Serpenti. What emerges is an intimate relationship with photography and images, an activity he has practised since he was a teenager and has refined over the years into a method that become indispensable even to his work as an art historian. “All these materials – said Barbero – will resound through their vicinity to the present, in a place that is open to all, in contact with young people who can study and become acquainted with them and who knows, from students they might become scholars one day.”

Luca Massimo Barbero - photographs - 2006