WO | MAN RAY. Le seduzioni della fotografia
17 October 2019 - 2 February 2020
Extended until 2nd February 2020.
CAMERA tribute to the great master Man Ray with the exhibition featuring around two hundred photographs produced from the 1920s right up to his death (1976), all dedicated to a specific subject: the woman, primary source of inspiration of all his poetics, here in photographic form.
The exhibition presents some of the images that wrote the history of 20th-century photography and which became part of the collective imagination thanks to Man Ray is ability to reinvent not only the photographic language, but also the representation of the body and the face and even genres such as the nude and the portrait through his rayographs, solarisations and double exposures. The female body is subjected to a continuous metamorphosis of shapes and meanings, becoming from time to time an abstract form, object of seduction, a classic memory, a realist portrait, in an extraordinary playful and highly refined reflection on the time and forms of representation, through photography and not only.
Assistants, inspirational muses and accomplices in various steps of this intellectual and life adventure, there were figures such as Lee Miller, Berenice Abbott, Meret Oppenheim and Dora Maar, with the constant, inescapable presence of Juliet: his lifelong companion who appears in some of the most amusing and significant images in the show. But in turn, these women were also great artists, and the exhibition will also focus on this aspect with works by them mostly from the 1930s and 40s: i.e. the period in which they were most directly in contact with Man Ray and with the Dadaist and Surrealist avant-garde environment of Paris.