The Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Modena is a bank that decided to invest in photography: in 2007, it began a photo and video collection by Italian and foreign artists, bringing to life exhibitions open to the public. The headquarters for all projects is the former San’Agostino de Modena hospital, an impressive space that, by the end of its renovation, will also be a new center for the image and photography. Recently inaugurated, Quatre is the forth chapter devoted to acquisitions of Italian photography. Four artists are featured with around 70 photographs: Olivo Barbieri, Vittore Fossati, Walter Niedermayr and Guido Guidi. They each have very different personalities, yet share the fact of belonging to what is known as the Italian school of landscape photography.
Olivo Barbieri (Carpi, 1954) started out in photography as a student in the University. His first work, Flippers (1977), is now exposed in Modena: pictures taken in a pinball machine factory, particularities, details that have become icons of that time. Parallel to this first series, there are also images exposed from the following years, testifying the evolution of Barbieri’s vision. An evolution that has driven him to explore landscape with a personal view, and that attracted the artist to the East (Barbieri has worked quite a lot in China) and more precisely in areas of transformation (construction sites for new neighborhoods, roads, etc…).
Vittore Fossati (1954) also started as a photographer in the 1970s, and joined the crucial Journey in Italy, conceived by Luigi Ghirri with Gianni Leone and Enzo Velati. The object of all his research is the importance of the vision and the viewing mechanisms that determine our relation with the reality, always filtered through a very large poetic sense.
Guido Guidi (Cesena, 1941) is a central figure in Italian photography: he was the first to photograph the most marginal and less spectacular landscape areas in the provinces. In the 1970s, he began a research on the spontaneous constructions in the region of Romagna and around the route of Romea.
Walter Nierdermayr (Bolzano, 1952) has quite a different point of view: in the 1980s, the author began an investigation on the interaction between men and the environment of the mountains, watching the mutations caused by mass tourism.
From the glaciers to the “petite bourgeoisie” gardens throughout the landscapes of the Bassa Padana: all different points of view, poetic and revealing.
Laura Incardona
Quattro. Olivo Barbieri, Vittore Fossati, Guido Guidi, Walter Niedermayr
Through June 5
Former Sant’Agostino Hospital
Largo Porta Sant’Agostino
Modena
