From 21 September to 13 January a CAMERA – Italian Center for Photography in the Piedmontese capital over 120 works will be exhibited including paintings, photographs, collages, graphics, which illustrate the variety and extraordinary vivacity of this great event.
The CAMERA activity is carried out thanks to Intesa Sanpaolo, Eni, Reda, Lavazza, while the exhibition and cultural programming is supported by the Compagnia di San Paolo.
Pop Art was a worldwide phenomenon, which exploded in the Sixties in the United States and in Europe, and spread rapidly also in the rest of the world "which has revolutionized – is the opinion of Walter Guadagnini, director of CAMERA and curator of the exhibition – the relationship between artistic creation and society, registering news in a neutral, photographic way, adopting the same models of mass communication for the creation of works of art. In this sense, photography has been, for Pop artists, not only a source of inspiration, but a real working tool, an essential part of their research".
The affirmation of Pop culture has also released surprising energies within the world of photographers, who have directly measured themselves not only with the contemporary visual panorama, but also with the logic of transforming documents into works of art.
Just think of the famous Andy Wharol whose works in most of their representations derive from photographs, such as "Marilyn", the "Electric Chairs" series and all the portraits of the celebrities of the time, and who took thousands of photographs, giving the mechanical reproduction of reality a central role in the definition of his poetics.
But we can also remember how Richard Hamilton's work "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing" from 1956, which will be on display, unanimously considered as the first fully Pop work in history, is a photographic collage . Just as in Italy the most famous representative of this trend, Mario Schifano, has always worked through and with the camera.
Among the protagonists present in the exhibition we can mention the Americans Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Ray Johnson, Rosalyn Drexler; the British Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, Allen Jones, Joe Tilson, David Hockney, Gerald Laing, Derek Boshier; the Germans Sigmar Polke, Wolf Vostell; the Italians Mimmo Rotella, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Franco Angeli, Umberto Bignardi, Gianni Bertini, Claudio Cintoli, Sebastiano Vassalli and many others.
Among the photographers, we highlight the presence of Ugo Mulas – to whom an entire room is dedicated, where the series created in the United States and that of the 1964 Venice Biennale will be exhibited – and of Tony Evans, photographer of the protagonists of the Swinging London of the very early sixties.
