The exhibition that presents 85 fotografie is edited by Monica Maffioli and Roberta Valtorta and created in collaboration with theEnzo Sellerio ArchiveThese are vintage prints and a series of prints from unpublished original negatives selected in part from the photographer's archive. Images that capture the places and people of Sicily, the artist's land, through fragments of lives, places, behaviors, observed with a free, ironic and not devoid of melancholy gaze. Photographs of a great author close, in narrative quality and power of synthesis, to the French humanist photography of authors such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau or Edouard Boubat.
Enzo Sellerio was born in Palermo into a cultured and cosmopolitan family
His father was a physicist and university professor and his mother, a Russian Jew, taught her language at the University of Palermo. He was educated in the fervent years of liberated Sicily and the post-war period. Founder, together with his wife Elvira Giorgianni, of the well-known publishing house, he designed and edited the art and photography books, and invented the graphics for all the series, including, The memory, the famous blue necklace. He was also a great collector and a refined interpreter of his time thanks to photography. An authoritative voice of Sicilian culture, a passionate defender of civil society and the island's identity values, a reference figure for many other photographers, artists, scholars, and writers.
The Milan exhibition venue, together with those in Turin, Naples and Vicenza, is part of the Intesa Sanpaolo Gallerie d'Italia museum project, led by Michele Coppola, Executive Director of Art, Culture and Historic Heritage Intesa Sanpaolo and General Manager of Gallerie d'Italia.
Michael Coppola, Executive Director of Art, Culture and Historical Heritage of Intesa Sanpaolo, states: “For Intesa Sanpaolo’s Gallerie d’Italia, being a living place in its country means actively taking part in the most significant anniversaries of Italian culture, contributing to the dissemination of knowledge of our heritage of identity. The participation in the celebrations for the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Enzo Sellerio fits into this logic, with an exhibition that hosts Sicily in Milan, narrated by the images and sensitivity of the great intellectual, photographer and publisher. Created together with the Archivio Sellerio, this new initiative is hosted in the Sala delle Colonne which, after the exhibitions on Maria Callas and Alighiero Boetti, confirms itself as a space dedicated to the protagonists of twentieth-century art and culture, today bringing attention to the extraordinary personality of a master of Italian photography.”
