Maurizio Galimberti
tra Polaroid/Ready Made e le Lezioni Americane di Italo Calvino
on Polaroid/Ready Made and Italo Calvino's American Lessons
Le Stanze della Fotografia /
The Rooms of Photography, Venice
Through 10 August 2025
Charlotte Gainsburg
Polaroid plate, 50 x 50 cm, 2003
By Maurizio Galimberti/Photomovie
Isabella Rossellini
Polaroid plate, 2003, 50 x 60 cm
By Maurizio Galimberti/ Photomovie
Johnny Depp
Polaroid plate, 2015, 50 x 60 cm
By Maurizio Galimberti/Photomovie
Le Stanze della Fotografia / The Rooms of Photography presents the exhibition Maurizio Galimberti tra Polaroid/Ready Made e le Lezioni Americane di Italo Calvino [Maurizio Galimberti on Polaroid/Ready Made and Italo Calvino's American Lessons], curated by Denis Curti, organised by Marsilio Arte and Fondazione Giorgio Cini.
Internationally known for his portraits of celebrities like Lady Gaga, Robert De Niro, Johnny Depp and Umberto Eco, and for having published books and staged site-specific exhibitions on New York, Paris, Milan, Rome and Venice, Maurizio Galimberti presents some of his most iconic Polaroid mosaics in Venice – including Johnny Depp, Barbara Bouchet and Angelica Huston – alongside more recent works, some of them previously unseen, such as those dedicated to Taylor Swift.
Maurizio Galimberti (Como, 1956) in 1983 began to use the Polaroid camera almost exclusively, appreciating it for the immediacy of its results and the possibility of “manipulation”. With it he creates photographic mosaics, the artistic form for which he is best known. His expressive language mixes a sensitivity to the contemporary image with influences derived from the historical avant-gardes - Futurism and Cubism for shapes and spirit, Surrealism and Dadaism for modes.
As Denis Curti observes, «his works do not set out to reproduce reality faithfully, but are the product of an investigation of the visible, an operation of breaking down the world that finds its ideal instrument in photography. Galimberti takes inspiration from David Hockney’s photographic collages and is guided in his research by such illustrious models as the Futurist works of Umberto Boccioni or Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, inspired in turn by Etienne-Jules Marey breakdown of movement» (D. Curti, Capire la fotografia contemporanea, Marsilio 2020).
Messico (4)
Polaroid plate, 2002, 40 x 50cm
By Maurizio Galimberti/Archivio M.G. - N.308
New York Studio n. 10
Polaroid plate, 2024, 31 x 66 cm
By Maurizio Galimberti/Angelos Dimitriou
Taylor Swift (1)
Polaroid plate, 2024, 50 x 54 cm
By Maurizio Galimberti/Luchi Collection
The exhibition is divided into six sections: Cenacolo, History, Sport, Portraits, Taylor Swift and Places, each of which presents a different facet of his work and his approach to photography. His creations, characterised by a multifaceted and fragmented vision of reality, are taken apart and put back together as in a mosaic, offering a profound reflection on perception and on the multiplicity of viewpoints.
The images are almost always manipulated at the development stage, exerting pressure with simple tools – like pens and wooden sticks – directly onto the surface of the support, or assembled into mosaic-like compositions, in which each photograph contributes to the formation of an end result able to create a spectacular overall vision.
«His technical inventions, manipulations, ready-mades and mosaics – Denis Curti still observes – are none other than the metaphor for a transversal language that does not pass through the filter of rationality, and, precisely for this reason, becomes emotion. In every one of his photos there is a precise gesturality, a visual act that finds its synthesis inside the definition of «Instant Artist», invented by Maurizio himself to describe his production, because, when he decided to transform his youthful passion into a profession, he chose the Instamatic camera as his ideal instrument. In his hands, this medium goes beyond the purely descriptive detail, through a procedure that is calculated and always oriented towards the transfiguration of the visible».
Le Stanze della Fotografia
The Rooms of Photography
Venice, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore
Maurizio Galimberti tra Polaroid/Ready Made e le Lezioni Americane di Italo Calvino
Maurizio Galimberti on Polaroid/Ready Made and Italo Calvino's American Lessons
Le Stanze della Fotografia / The Rooms of Photography, Venice, 10 April – 10 August 2025