Matthew Marks Gallery

Luigi Ghirri

Inspired in part by the Conceptual art of his time, Luigi Ghirri used his camera to examine the relationship between the physical world and the world of images. His subject was the landscape around him, but his photographs are much more than visual documents of 1970s and 1980s Italy. With his uncanny eye for composition, Ghirri searched out chance arrangements in the human-built world, framing them in his camera’s viewfinder like found photomontages. He worked in color because, as he put it, “the real world is in color,” and he made modestly sized meticulous prints, rarely producing more than one or two from each image.

In 1978 he published Kodachrome, a book of his photographs that touches on many of the subjects that defined his career, including windows, billboards, murals, and other sites where, as he put it, “the world of signs merges with the physical world.” Ghirri wrote eloquently about the power of the image in contemporary life, especially in relation to photography: “Beyond all critical and intellectual explanations, 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.”

Luigi Ghirri (1943–1992) spent his working life in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. Although he exhibited extensively in Italy during his lifetime, it is only since his untimely death that his work has begun to be more widely appreciated. In 2010 Thomas Demand organized the acclaimed exhibition “La Carte d’Après Nature” around Ghirri’s photographs, and in 2011 and 2013 Ghirri’s work was featured in the Venice Biennale. His 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, and the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. In 2018 the first major retrospective of his work at a museum outside of Italy opened at the Museum Folkwang in Essen and later traveled to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

Selected Works

Exhibitions

LUIGI GHIRRI
Mediations

November 10–December 22, 2023

526 West 22nd Street
New York

LUIGI GHIRRI
The Idea of Building

October 22–December 19, 2020

526 West 22nd Street & Online
New York & Online

LUIGI GHIRRI
The Impossible Landscape

February 26–April 30, 2016

526 West 22nd Street
New York

LUIGI GHIRRI
La Città

April 19–July 12, 2014

7818 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles

LUIGI GHIRRI
Kodachrome

March 6–April 20, 2013

526 West 22nd Street
New York

Group Exhibitions

SUMMER GROUP EXHIBITION

July 19–August 16, 2014

1062 North Orange Grove
7818 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles

LA CARTE D’APRÉS NATURE
An exhibition curated by Thomas Demand

July 19–October 8, 2011

522 West 22nd Street
New York

Current Museum Exhibitions