Giovanni Gastel.
The People I Like

Piero Lissoni with Lissoni Associati curates the exhibition design for “Giovanni Gastel. The People I Like.” at the Maxxi Museum in Rome from 15th September to 27th November.

The spatial layout of the exhibition design recalls the one already adopted for the Giovanni Gastel exhibition at the Palazzo della Ragione in Milan in 2016, and is here presented as a tribute to Germano Celant, the art critic and curator of that respective who sadly passed away recently.

The labyrinthine space, marked out by screens of varying sizes, presents the portraits of Giovanni Gastel as if the individuals are looking out from windows onto some urban landscape. This collective dimension of the exhibition emphasizes the network of relationships and connections that the photographer cultivated throughout his career, while the introspective investigation of each subject reveals their specific individuality.

Typical of Gastel’s portraits, the colours of this small and imaginary town alternate between black and white, the same hues of the huge photograph of the artist that sits above the staircase and which greets visitors as they enter.

The exhibition also brings a more traditional system of displaying portraiture to present the so-called “colli neri” collection: passing from suggestions of an urban exterior one enters a space with intimations of an interior, a black and white “portrait gallery” of people all attired in dark turtlenecks.

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Web Design / Tommaso Cavallini; Text / Alice Caudera, Laura Cucchi, Donatella Brun; Translation / Richard Peace; Content management / Giorgia Maretta, Laura Presti, Constanza Coscia; Web development / Friweb.
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