Dialoghi. Pino Pascali e Ugo Mulas has been extended to November 6th 2022. The exhibition is curated by Alessio de’ Navasques in collaboration with the Ugo Mulas Archive, under the scientific coordination of Rosalba Branà.
Forty-one black-and-white images, rare vintage prints, little-known series or works never fully exhibited, sketch a picture of encounters and crossed destinies, between the Milanese photographer and the Apulian artist, in a new story that rearranges and restores the relationships between art, fashion and publishing, through the pioneering experience of L’Uomo Vogue.
In 1967, when the Italian edition of Vogue was first published, Mulas was asked to take some portraits of Pino Pascali, which were shot in Rome the following year. Those images codify the myth of Pascali in a new and seductive iconography and constitute the incipit to the first part of the exhibition itinerary, where this story is reconstructed as a peculiar experience within Mulas’ portraiture dedicated to artists, in this case following the distinctive perspective of fashion photography.
In the dilated time of each frame, Pascali moves, rolls around, interacts with his work Cavalletto, at moments staging a performance, and lifts his own body in a symbolic reversal. In this sequence, fully displayed for the first time, Mulas captures with his typical witness-interpreter detachment, gained in New York from observing artists – and Duchamp in particular – the characteristic traits of Pascali’s personality: his ironic verve, his non-conformism, his profound intention in the pursuit of the perfect gesture, and in his relationship with artwork.
These shots were to become his most famous portrait, a repeated sequence in the collective imagination of contemporary art: and yet only a few people know the matrix of those photos, whose origin the exhibition reassembles by rekindling attention to Mulas’s photographic production for the first issues of L’Uomo Vogue.
Actually, between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the magazine, under the artistic direction of Flavio Lucchini is a ground for experimentation and research, in the sign of an Italian creativity so fresh and radical that it makes the publication a unicum, distributed worldwide. More