per l’Arte

Prospettive

In the wake of the book Money! Art Economy and Globalisation, we continue a reading of the contemporary panorama in pursuit of those contact points between economy and art which often offer cues for insight.

Thanks to the invaluable cooperation of Studio Basilico and Photo & Contemporary, Tosetti Value is pleased to present a selection of some of the Milanese master’s most significant works.

A photographer absorbed by the complexities of urban culture that characterized the second half of the 1900’s, the author accompanies us through the epochal stages of his work on a journey that illustrates the evolution of the urban landscape in the era of globalisation

The exhibition opens with Basilico’s first works on industrial archaeology and illustrates the shifting of the centre of production from the factory to the city. Milan. Portraits of Factories, published in 1981, is the first of a series of books that would be a counterpoint to the stages of an intense artistic journey.

Through the eyes of an attentive “measurer of space”, as the author liked to define himself, we gradually enter the vertical heart of major urban centres to then move away for a wider view of broader, more recent vistas. Europe, America and Asia, represented by their main metropolises, alternatively suggest the process of hybridization that cancels all geographical distance. In rendering the fragmentary nature of our times, Basilico is our guide to the “global place” he has pursued with emotion and method.

Before the Eighties, in the early days of his artistic career, the author discovered the cornerstones of photography that would inspire his poetics.in the pages of catalogues and the monographs. From Eugène Atget’s urban poetry to the socio-anthropological rigor of August Sander and Walker Evans and the analytical approach of Bernd & Hilla Becher. Basilico’s photography does not celebrate architecture, but establishes an empathy with the human body, reflecting on the aesthetic value of buildings in relation to their social function. Far removed from the urgency of the “candid shot”, the master kept intact the tradition of those photographers who found the key to observing inside and outside themselves in the “slowness of the gaze”.

Exhibition catalogue