Massimo Listri
Prospettive/Perspectives
» Beauty is never given. For Listri it is sought for, recognised, created.«
(Cesare Cunaccia)
» His photographs are theorems of human absence ...«
(Vittorio Sgarbi)
Born in Florence in 1953, even as a child Massimo Listri busied himself with the photographic medium, and when he was an art student he supplied many photographs to periodicals devoted to art, architecture and interior design.
In 1981, together with Vittorio Sgarbi, Massimo Listri co-founded the international periodical FMR published by Franco Maria Ricci, who at the time was establishing a highly exclusive art publishing house in Milan. Central to both the periodical and Ricci’s books was a kind of photography that reached new summits of achievement with bold angles and off-centre focusing – always with the goal of doing justice to the uniqueness of the photographic subject.
As a freelance art photographer, Listri developed his fascinating interior perspectives, all artistic spaces devoid of human beings, and his series of international libraries, including monastic libraries such as Kremsmünster. In addition, his series “Building Sites” features atmospheric and melancholic photographs of spaces upon which work is in progress. As if awoken by his lens, Listri’s interiors live a life of their own, independent of the human race, a life that manifests itself under the influence of light in the precision of their detail.
In the last thirty years Massimo Listri has brought out more than sixty books in collaboration with some of the best-known publishing houses of Europe and the USA.
His work has been presented in many solo exhibitions throughout the world, including: the Palazzo Reale, Milan (2008), the Palazzo Pitti, Florence (2009), the Morgan Library and Museum, New York (2010), the National Library of Taipei (2012), the Italian Institute of Culture, Tokyo (2012), the Museum of Modern Art of Bogota (2012), the Museum of Italian Art, Lima (2012), the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art (2012), the “living art gallery”, Santiago de Chile (2013), the Galeria Nacional de Bellas Artes, Dominican Republic (2013), the Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow (2013), the Museo Nacional San Carlos, Mexico City (2014), the Benaki Museum, Athens (2014), the Vatican Museums, Rome (2014), and the Palazzo Reale, Turin (2014).
Information
30 January 2015
to 26 October 2015
Please note that admission to the exhibition may have to be limited at times to facilitate special events.
June 29 – July 13, 2015 the Bassano Hall is closed for the installation of the exhibition “Threads of Power”; we apologize that also means a temporary closure of the exhibition “Massimo Listri”.