Gabriele Basilico: Intercity

The Cohen Amador Gallery is pleased to announce “Intercity”, cityscapes by internationally renowned Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico. Pooled from his most recent bodies of work, the exhibition articulates Basilico’s lifelong fascination with the city as a densely collaged environment. The stunningly diverse and engaging range of Basilico’s city subjects are accentuated and emphasized by his technical mastery: an old school obsession with contrast and tonal richness which mixes with a post-industrial subject worthy of prolonged reflection.

Many photographers achieve a certain degree of proficiency as either darkroom alchemists or thought provoking social commentators. Basilico very coyly achieves and excels at both. Trained as an architect, Basilico’s work shows a clear understanding of how space expresses itself as a network of urban enclaves that are often closed-off to the camera’s gaze. In a photo of Monaco, Basilico looks down from a balcony at a street undulating through a dense set of residential buildings. He positions himself high enough so as to make the buildings appear unyielding, yet not so high as to completely abstract them from their socially embedded, urban reality. The architecture of these buildings is neither modern and ascetic, nor traditional and opulent. Thus they appear cordoned off into atomized forms that intentionally refrain from divulging any information about their interiors or their residents.

This character of spatial isolation and urban indifference persists throughout the work and speaks to the state of the post-industrial—post-modern—city. In their indifference, architecture and industry are shown to aggressively reject human access. As though after roughly two centuries of industrial development and urban growth the cities themselves are refusing to continue to participate. Even recent buildings, like those portrayed in Basilico’s images of Moscow, appear like platonic solids that are self-contained, Orwellian and uninterested in the drama that surrounds them. The rich noirish contrast of all his photos compliments this sense of architectural alienation and strengthens the unyielding appearance of the cities. Like Berenice Abbott or Thomas Struth, there is a cold flippancy to the rationality of these built forms. As a result, we the viewer marvel at the image’s richness, while at the same time we are left to contemplate the impertinence of the pictured subjects.

Basilico was born in Milan in 1944. He has photographed all over Europe and the world, including a project commissioned by the French government to document changes in the national landscape in 1984 and a project photographing devastated Beirut in 1991. He was awarded the “Grand Prix International du Mois de La Photo” in 1990 and won the top prize for the Sixth Exhibition of Architecture of the Venice Biennial by the international jury. He has exhibited widely across Europe and the United States, including a retrospective of his work from 1984-1999 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2000 and a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2008. He has published many books including “Porti di Mare” and “Berlin,” for which he was awarded the prize of the year's best photography book by PhotoEspagna in June of 2002.

The Cohen Amador Gallery is located in the landmark Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street on the 6th floor. Gallery hours are 11 am to 6 pm Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment. For additional information, please contact the gallery at 212-759-6740, visit www.cohenamador.com or contact us at info@cohenamador.com.

Gabriele Basilico
Intercity