Gabriele Basilico
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Italian Photographer Gabriele Basilico
was born in 1944 and studied architecture in Milan. He made his debut in the late 1960s with sociological, environmental, architectural and urban research photographs. His first solo Exhibition was called “Portraits of factories”.
The suburban landscape, the form and identity of cities, the transition from the industrial to the post-industrial era, were his main areas of research.
Gabriele Basilico published on these themes more than sixty monographies. Besides that, he participated in countless public commissioning projects on behalf of major institutions. During his life and after, he has been awarded with several prices.
Basilico’s main artistic research
He often proposes the human presence in the urban landscape. The most recurring figures are children, interpreters of the transformation that is often a subject Basilico dwells on. The photographer superimposes the human presence on urban spaces, in delicate balances between empty and full spaces or old and new environments.
Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico is not a traveler who photographs but a photographer who travels.
He teaches us to value the urban landscape in a totally new way. His is an approach of analytical documentation of the relationship between space and life. The cities whose images he offers us in the course of his photographic research are many famous Italian and foreign cities, but also unknown and dilapidated neighbourhoods and suburbs.
Among the works of Basilico it is important to distinguish certain investigations of the human figure. In particular, some portraits where the subjects (not models but very ordinary people) are ladies intent on sunbathing, or young people going dancing in 70s clubs, old people in Italian dance halls, construction workers at work.
Here, too, as in the urban landscape, the analysis is on what we live daily in its mediocrity, its uncertainty, its disorder. Basilico investigates and gives us back the beautiful even where beauty is not there or is not so obvious, training our eye to look for art in every corner.
Gabriele Basilico ‘s city is never in the style of reporters. It is not crowded it is not poetical.
He watches it in analytical mode, closer to documentary photography. He transposes into his prints the fixity of Giorgio De Chirico’s uninhabited cities and the attention to the urban blocks of the suburbs painted by Mario Sironi.
In his exhibitions he often returns to the same theme, the same place, as if to testify to the anthropization of the landscape, with the eye of the urban architect identifying the traces of man in constant and inexorable shifting. Without ever mentioning man himself, without putting him in the foreground.
Gabriele Basilico died in 2013.
His works can be found in more than 50 museums around the world.
Here are some links to Galleries that host his works:
Galleria Astuni – Bologna, Italy
Studio Guenzani – Milan, Italy
Studio La Città – Verona, Italy
And, most importantly, the Gabriele Basilico Archive
Below are some of my favourite photo books on Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico.