Luca Maria Patella, a complex figure and great experimenter who ranges between media, photography, film language, sculpture, visual poetry and performances, was born in Rome in 1934. His operating mode is a language constantly being brought up-to-date, influenced by the non-stop renewal of technology within the different disciplines he has adopted throughout his artistic career. As Gillo Dorfles wrote about him in 1997: “He is the only great continuer of a break in modern art that started with Duchamp, and completely overturned the genre of visual art”.
The exhibition shows the artist’s role in the evolution of photographic and video languages, starting from his experiences of the mid-1960s, the engravings and photographic canvases, through the works of the 1970s and 80s, self-focused images made with a fish-eye lens which the artist calls “self-photos”. The exhibition continues with his experiments on perception and reproduction of colour up to the large, extremely rare Polaroids from the 1990s. Thanks to the collaboration with the Fondazione Centro Sperimentale diCinematografia in Rome and the Fondazione Cineteca in Bologna, the show will include a selection of films, Terra Animata (1965-1967), SKMP2 (1968) and Vedo, Vado! (1969), awarded the “Osella d’Argento” in Venice.