The Beirut exhibition, specially designed by the Gabriele Basilico Archive in Milan for the Italian Cultural Institute in the Lebanese capital, brings together 57 works by Gabriele Basilico created between 1978 and 2012, in black and white and in colour.
The design of the exhibition indirectly refers to a book published in 2001 by the British publisher Phaidon Press, ‘Gabriele Basilico 55’, for which Basilico selected 55 works from what he considered at the time to be his most interesting photographs. The current selection, conceived for the Beirut Art Center, offers a collection of images selected by the author himself at the time, complemented by more recent ones depicting the urban landscapes of cities around the world, taken during various professional assignments during the first decade of the 2000s.
Included in this new selection are some of Basilico’s first works dedicated to the industrial suburbs, “Milan. Portraits of Factories’, a kind of catalogue of the industrial reality of Milan in the three years between 1978 and 1980, an extremely important step for him, marking the almost definitive forsaking of a photojournalistic vision in favour of an interest in urban landscape.
This first project was presented in 1983 at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan. It was followed by an important and prestigious participation in a photographic mission commissioned by the French government, the Mission Photographique de la D.A.T.A.R., in 1984-1985, during which the photographer explored the Normandy coast from the Belgian border to Mont Saint-Michel. Then Beirut wounded by fifteen years of civil war in 1991, and Beirut reconstructed and projected into 2011. And again: San Francisco, portrayed by Basilico for MoMA San Francisco in 2007, seaports and, of course, cities: Moscow, Shanghai, Barcelona, Istanbul, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and others, up to Milan, his hometown.
The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Beirut Art Center and Archivio Gabriele Basilico, and is under the patronage of the Italian Embassy in Lebanon.
Beirut Art Center (BAC) is a non-profit association, space, and platform dedicated to art research and cultural practices in Beirut. Since opening in 2009, BAC has facilitated the creation and realization of projects as well as interactions between local and international cultural initiatives in a space that is open and active all year long. Over the past years Beirut Art Center has been working diligently during a period of increasing political, financial, economic, social, and environmental emergency and compounding crisis to bridge socio-political life, artistic practices and art institutions. The center’s evolving program is guided by our senses, by language or rather its inadequacy; and by the relationship to our environment, each other and our possible futures. It consists of exhibitions; learning initiatives conceived for various ages and abilities; cinema, and music, and involve different communities.
The Gabriele Basilico Archive, directed by Giovanna Calvenzi Basilico with Filippo Maggia as project manager, is a natural continuation of the activities of the Basilico Studio and preserves the negatives, samples, slides and prints produced by the Milanese photographer between 1970 and 2013. It works to protect the author’s image, organizes exhibitions and coordinates the publication of books dedicated to him. It is open to dialogue with students, researchers and collectors.
Website: https://www.archiviogabrielebasilico.it/