Headquarters - La Biennale di Venezia
Ca' Giustinian
Un Diavolo Amico. Luca Massimo Barbero - Exhibition
On the Canal Grande in the headquarters of La Biennale di Venezia - Ca Giustinian - on show is the archive of critic, historian and curator of modern and contemporary art - Luca Massimo Barbero - the exhibition entitled - Luca Massimo Barbero. Un Diavolo Amico - will become part of the ever growing Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee della Biennale di Venezia. Barbero’s archive stands out as a living archive that is constantly expanding; it will be enriched with everything that its owner will produce in the future and that he himself will continue to use. It will also be a propositive archive that will inspire initiatives for the Biennale Archives themselves.
"To define Luca Massimo Barbero’s choice, I use the word ‘gesture’ in its broadest semantic meaning (movement, the expression of a feeling, an action motivated by profound reasons) because it clearly defeats the concept of an archive to which something is left for the sole purpose of conservation. In this case, something is left behind to increase its breathing capacity and grow within a context that can enhance it, making it available to the widest possible public”.
Roberto Cicutto
President of La Biennale di Venezia
Luca Massimo Barbero, Debora Rossi and Roberto Cicutto
The exhibition, introduced by a text of Nicolas Ballario - journalist and expert on contemporary art applied to media - presents a first tranche of materials from Luca Massimo Barbero’s archive, which will be exhibited on a rotating basis in the coming months. It is a sort of ‘coring’ that reveals the many aspects of his personality and methods of study and curatorship. Drawings, photographs, notes from his sketchbooks, storyboards, catalogues, objects, all bear witness to his forty-year curatorial practice, which distinguishes his professional career at an international level.
Debora Rossi, Nicholas Ballario, Roberto Cicutto and Luca Massimo Barbero
Sala Portego
The walls of the Portego at Ca’ Giustinian host a series of historic photographs from Cameraphoto that depict events at La Biennale di Venezia from 1948 to 1981: a collection of photographs that summarise the fundamentals of Barbero’s training and bear witness to his bond with the Venetian institution through his ample photo library.
Roy Lichtenstein - 1965 - Robert Rauschenberg -1975 - Jasper Johns - 1962
Robert Rauschenberg -1974 - Robert Rauschenberg -1975 -
Interior - U.S. ex-consulate Venice -1964
XXXII Biennale di Venezia -1964
Emanuela Bassetti
Luca Cipolletti and David Tremlett
Sala Portego
Russian Pavilion - La Biennale di Venezia - 1960
Romolo Bazzoni, Rodolfo Pallucchini and Giovanni Ponti - 1948
A model in front of paintings by Giuseppe Capogrossi - 1962
Visitors - XXVI Biennale di Venezia - 1952
Sala Portego
Pablo Picasso - 1947/1948 - Rodolfo Pallucchini and Pablo Picasso
Palma Bucarelli - sculpture by Alberto Viani - XXIV La Biennale di Venezia - 1948
Henri Matisse - 1948 - Henry Moore - 1948 -
Henry Moore - XXIV La Biennale di Venezia - 1948
Luca Massimo Barbero
Maria Luisa Frisa and Mario Lupano
Manuela Luca Dazio
The two rooms at the far ends the ends of the Portego display Luca Massimo Barbero's curatorial method and practice, in the almost obsessive attention he paid to the slightest detail in his exhibitions and publications, which shares the “originality” which has led him to be considered one of the most authoritative figures in art history today. The Sala Mostre presents several past exhibitions, from the one dedicated to Peter Greenaway at the Fortuny Museum in 1993, to a mosaic of images and materials relative to the installations of works by artists such as Lucio Fontana, Carla Accardi, Anthony Gormley, Shirin Neshat, Tomas Saraceno and Arcangelo Sassolino, organized from the 1990s to the present at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, at the Macro of Rome, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and at the Kunsthaus in Zurich.
Sala Mostre
Manfredi Bellati, Fabrizio Plessi and Manlio Brusatin
Fabio Pacifico, Cristiana Costanzo and Elisabetta Barisoni
Pamela Berry and Maria Grazia Rosin
“All these materials will resound through their vicinity to the present, in a place that is open to all, in contact with young people who can study and become acquainted with them and who knows, from students they might become scholars one day.”
Luca Massimo Barbero
The room that has always been known as the Sala Bimbi - kid's room - presents a world that is known to very few, it depicts a man critics have defined “the art historian who hunts images”: a selection of sketches and drawings, texts and lectures from his work as a teacher at the Scuola Holden in Turin; a previously unknown Barbero, a photographer for the national Greco-Roman wrestling team; portraits from a decade-long photography project entitled Candidi Come Colombe Astuti Come Serpenti. What emerges is an intimate relationship with photography and images, an activity he has practised since he was a teenager and has refined over the years into a method that become indispensable even to his work as an art historian. “All these materials – said Barbero – will resound through their vicinity to the present, in a place that is open to all, in contact with young people who can study and become acquainted with them and who knows, from students they might become scholars one day.”
Luca Massimo Barbero - photographs - 2006
Sala Bimbi
Luca Massimo Barbero - Nothing Special - photographs - 2006
Sala Bimbi
Luca Massimo Barbero
Candido Come Colombe Astuti Come Serpenti - 1994-2003
Ca' Giustinian - Sala Portego
Un Diavolo Amico. Luca Massimo Barbero - Exhibition
