Maurizio Galimberti. Uno sguardo sulla nostra storia.

From 1 March to 1 May 2022, the Carlo Maria Martini Diocesan Museum in Milan hosts A look at our history, the exhibition featuring 30 large-format photographs by Maurizio Galimberti (Como, 1956), one of the best-known Italian authors and celebrated on the Italian and international art scene.

Galimberti, Fuji Ambassador since 2017, has established himself thanks to his mosaic compositions, made with instant cameras, in which the subject – be it a person or a portion of the city – is broken down into numerous shots, often corresponding to different perspectives , and recomposed into a multifaceted image.

In this review, curated by Denis Curti, Maurizio Galimberti, famous for his portraits of celebrities from cinema, sport, culture, society, confronts the history of the twentieth century, retracing it through its protagonists, such as John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and those crucial episodes that characterized their development, from the war in Vietnam, to the attack on the Twin towers, to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“With this new project – affirms Denis Curti – our Instant Artist analyzes some icons of our recent history and, through the poetics of the ready made, gives new strength to those images so well known and, perhaps, too radicalized”.

“Seen all together – continues Denis Curti -, these mosaics immediately appear as a collection of memorable and widely historicized events and which here, thanks to the reinterpretation of Galimberti, are transformed into real contemporary relics. Galimberti seems to want to enter with all of himself in those stories and offers us new eyes, dismayed gazes capable of making us reflect “.

“In this path – underlines Nadia Righi, director of the Diocesan Museum of Milan – the history of the twentieth century is seen through highly dramatic episodes, with images that in many cases have remained etched in each of us, but also through characters, faces and gestures that they tell the possibility of a positive outlook on reality “.

“The project – recalls Maurizio Galimberti – was born from a confrontation with Paolo Ludovici, who produced the entire work and lent all the works on display, with whom I share a sincere friendship and a design complicity capable of renewing itself every day”.

Using his particular technique, Galimberti explores the short century, giving new life and new meanings to the shots made by other authors. The exhibition itinerary is made up of sections that portray the main actors of the twentieth century, such as Pope John Paul II, or Nelson Mandela in his sympathetic cross of fists with Muhammad Ali, or Nikita Khrushchev while banging his shoe on the seat of the Assembly of United Nations in New York, or Mother Teresa of Calcutta in the tender gesture of hugging a child.

And it is precisely through the faces of the little ones, as if they were refugees from dreams, in the urgency of a future that appears difficult if not impossible to face, that Galimberti prefers to tell the tragedies of the 1900s.

Here then are the dramatic images of the children of Auschwitz, of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, of Vietnam, of Srebrenica, or even of the little migrants who died on a beach or separated from their parents on the border between the United States and Mexico, or who seek salvation in their arms. of the soldiers.

Galimberti does not forget to document the scourge of terrorism, such as the attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics or the attack on the twin towers or the Italian military in Nassiria.