The exhibition dedicated to Giovanni Gastel at the Palazzo Citterio in Milan comes as a surprise for its visual and emotional impact. As well as the exhibition itself, the space offers visitors other treasures. Indeed, the palace, that opened its doors to the public at the end of 2024, is the centerpiece of the ‘Grande Brera’, a unique museum reality that combines tradition and modernity. It features masterpieces by Italian and international artists, including Boccioni, Morandi, Modigliani, Picasso and Carrà. But let us return to the images by Giovanni Gastel. With over 250 photographs on display, visitors can retrace his career through a poetic and thematic lens, rather than in chronological order.
According to curator Uberto Frigerio, the resulting exhibition layout was also inspired by research carried out “among the photographer’s private texts and notes. The intention was to let his words recount each fragment of his life as emotional chapters. Each section stems from his thoughts and inner voice, because no one knew better than Giovanni how to transform memories into images and images into stories”. The exhibition (designed by Giovanni Fiore) spans his first fashion covers in 1977 to his most innovative still lifes. It features Polaroids against gold backgrounds, campaigns that have shaped the history of fashion, portraits and much more. It includes personal items, work tools and writings as well as poems, all of which are extremely useful for understanding Giovanni’s creativity and imagination. In the library of his studio in via Tortona in Milan, alongside his vast collection of books on painting, sculpture, photography and poetry, Gastel had set up a ‘private’ picture gallery, with portraits of his friends and family, and other memories. The exhibition also attempts to reconstruct his private world. Interestingly, some of his compositions are dedicated to photographic materials and equipment, which are the photographer’s tools for creating poetry.
“I imagined this exhibition as a tape rewinding to retrace and try to relive Giovanni Gastel’s creative journey,” Uberto Frigerio says. This is a journey that began a long time ago and continues through the exhibition, thanks to the featured different photographic techniques and experimentations, accompanied by Gastel’s own words. These are words that help us to understand his vision on various subjects. For example, regarding portraiture, Gastel wrote: ‘I’m not a mirror. I am a filter. The portrait I will make will be you, filtered by everything I am (my fears, my joy, my moments of loneliness, my poems)…’
“It was a long journey indeed, focused on constantly surpassing the ‘known’ and aiming for the continuous pursuit of beauty, both in commissioned photographs and in freer creativity where, without commissioned work, he pursued his fantasies, always maintaining his innate elegance. There was a constant slight uneasiness in him that led him to say, ‘Every morning, the quest for perfection begins again in a pursuit that is creative madness and profound joy’. This also includes his quest for the ‘perfect’ photograph”, Frigerio adds.
Gastel grew up in an aristocratic Milanese environment, and his elegant, precise, cultured, ironic and free-thinking style emerged from a combination of culture, poetry and pragmatism. Influenced in part by his uncle, the director Luchino Visconti (of Il Gattopardo and Ludwig fame), he trained in theatre. He used to write poems and he took up photography in 1972.
All that remains to do is to observe the works on display: ironic still lifes, natures mortes that seem to come to life, large-format Polaroids, fashion, portraits, continuous experimentation, the search for new photographic languages. Gastel created photographic languages using different tools, from the optical bench to digital technology. He pushed the associated aesthetics to the limit by distorting, superimposing and painting images manually or digitally.
According to the art historian, photographer and writer Guillaume de Sardes, Gastel “creates an aesthetic of pleasure that goes against the evidence of reality. He belongs to a group of photographers who believe that an image is not about capturing a ‘decisive moment’, but about creating a space for thought.”
For him, photography is not a mirror of the world, but rather a matter of vision, nourished not only by the history of its medium but by the entire history of art. Gastel conceived photography as an everyday practice, marked by failure, doubt and repetition. These were necessary steps in the search for an ideal form, and Gastel never allowed technique decide for him. Instead, he constantly forced it to produce something different from what it promised.”
The exhibition also includes Le Madonne Candelore, a previously unseen project created by Gastel and Simone Guidarelli. This series was intended to form part of a larger project that remained unfinished following Giovanni’s premature death in 2021.
Curated by Uberto Frigerio, produced by La Grande Brera with the Giovanni Gastel Archive, in collaboration with the Guardans-Cambó Agency, the exhibition Giovanni Gastel. Rewind is accompanied by a catalogue curated by Luca Stoppini and published by Allemandi Editore.
Giovanni Gastel. Rewind
From January 30 to July 26, 2026
Palazzo Citterio
via Brera 12, 20121 Milano
Italy
https://palazzocitterio.org/en/
