Massimo Vitali
MASSIMO VITALI – NEW WORK
ONLINE Exhibition Dates: September 18 – December 4, 2020
Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce an ONLINE exhibition of new work by Massimo Vitali. As the COVID-19 pandemic rendered most public space around the world off limits, Vitali headed back to the beaches he has for so long documented. Since the end of the lockdowns in Italy, "the new normal" has become the go-to term to describe the reality of a world hit by COVID-19. It is a "new" way of living, full of precautions, hygiene measures and habits that seem to have changed our behavior, and eroded the sociability and proximity that characterize the human race. Massimo Vitali went to the beach once more, to observe the new normal. The densely populated environment—one of his favorite subjects—once more proved to be curiously normal. The urge to be out in the open air, seeing friends, making the most of the sea and sun, diving into the water and leaving behind the worries of the week: all that is still there. A few masks, some nifty footwork to avoid strangers and maintain social distancing, and a mostly Italian rather than international population form the backdrop to these images. Nonetheless, those elements are not what first catches the viewer's eye. Just as the week's worries are left behind, this new normal that everyone is talking about did not make it to the beach. Instead, a sort of collective ritual of rebirth occurred, with the sea and sun seeming to repel the virus that has been mysteriously shadowing us for several months.
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Massimo Vitali was born in Como, Italy, in 1944, and is currently based in Lucca, Italy, and Berlin. Vitali studied photography at the London College of Printing. He worked as a photojournalist in the 1970s, but at the beginning of the 80s a growing mistrust in the belief that photography had an absolute capacity to reproduce the subtleties of reality led to a change in his career path. He began working as a movie camera operator, before beginning a fine-art practice in 1995.
His series of Italian beach panoramas began in the light of drastic political changes in Italy. Vitali started to observe his fellow countrymen very carefully. He depicted a “sanitized, complacent view of Italian normalities,” at the same time revealing “the inner conditions and disturbances of normality: its cosmetic fakery, sexual innuendo, commodified leisure, deluded sense of affluence, and rigid conformism.”
Vitali’s work has been collected in four books: Beach and Disco, Natural Habitats, Landscapes With Figures, and Landscapes With Figures 2. His photographs have been published in magazines, newspapers, and other periodicals around the world. Additionally, his work is represented in the world’s major museums, including the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, the Fond National Art Contemporaine in Paris, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and the Museo Luigi Pecci in Prato.
MASSIMO VITALI
Sep 18 - Dec 4, 2020