Until July 16, the Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana in Lugano presents the color photos of Werner Bischof with the exhibition Unseen Color.
The works of the Swiss photographer, considered one of the great masters of reportage and photography of the 20th century, are explored for the first time in an exhaustive way thanks to a hundred color digital prints from original negatives from the years 1939 and 1950.
The exhibition is conceived as a free journey through the worlds that Bischof visited and experienced, and covers his entire career. It presents an alternation of color images obtained using a Rolleiflex camera, with its characteristic square negatives, and a Leica, with its classic rolls of 35 mm film. The explosion of colors is particularly noticeable in a group of works taken with the Devin Tri-Color camera, which guarantees the highest quality and definition of color rendering. The images taken by Bischof with this camera are presented to the public for the first time. The subjects on display are those well known to the artist who, in photographs taken all over the world, always managed, like few others, to combine aesthetics and emotion in perfect compositions.
Werner Bischof (Zurich, April 26, 1916 – Trujillo, May 16, 1954) was trained by Hans Finsler at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Zurich. He opened his first photography studio in 1936 and worked in parallel for advertising and fashion agencies. His experience in the Swiss army during the Second World War radically changed his approach to photography: he traveled across Europe in search of places destroyed by war for the Swiss magazine Du and joined the famous Magnum photo agency in 1949. He produced photo reports in various places in the Orient, including India, Korea, Indochina and Japan, and also worked for magazines such as Life and Paris Match. During a trip that took him from the United States to Peru via Mexico, he passed away in the Andes at the age of 38, following a serious car accident.
Werner Bischof : Unseen Colour
Until July 16, 2023
Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano
Via Canova 10, e, Piazza Bernardino Luini 6
6900 Lugano, Switzerland
www.masilugano.ch
