AMERICAN STANDARD CO. for Art & Design

Luigi Ghirri (November, 2023)

Inspired by the Conceptual art of his time, Luigi Ghirri (1943–1992) examined the relationship between the physical world around us and the ever-growing landscape of images encountered through advertising and mass media. While he took many photographs in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region where he made his home, he also traveled abroad and captured a vast array of images that not only include landscapes, but also chance arrangements in a human-built environment, framing them in his camera’s viewfinder like found photomontages. With his uncanny eye for composition, Ghirri’s photographs are much more than visual documents of his time. Ghirri wrote eloquently about the power of image in contemporary life, especially in relation to photography: “Beyond all critical and intellectual explanation, beyond all negative aspects it might possess, photography is, I think, a formidable visual language for fostering this desire for the infinite that inhabits each of us.”

Ghirri’s work has been the subject of several museum exhibitions in recent years, including at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In 2018, the first major retrospective of his work outside of Italy opened at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, and traveled to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

On view at Matthew Marks Gallery from November 10 – December 22, 2023.