Marco Anelli: Building Magazzino featured Italian artist Marco Anelli’s commissioned photographic project documenting Magazzino Italian Art’s construction. From its conception in 2014 to its transformation of an industrial building into a warehouse, Marco Anelli’s photographs tells the story of how Magazzino came to be a staple for Italian Art in the United States.
A homonymous exhibition—organized by Magazzino Italian Art with the Italian Cultural Institute of New York and curated by Magazzino’s Director Vittorio Calabrese—displayed a selection of 24 large-format color photographs in the Institute's galleries, including 11 portraits, three of which had almost-real-life-size dimensions.
The ground floor gallery presented a selection of photographs depicting the different phases of the construction, subtly referencing the passing of time in a juxtaposition of void and materiality, finished and unfinished, detail and the whole. The foyer and the first-floor gallery were dedicated to some of the portraits Anelli realized during the past two years at Magazzino, where the construction workers were captured throughout the building’s phases without any artifice or pose, but with great honesty and respect.
Unique to other photographic projects narrating the construction of art institutions, Anelli’s work expanded its gaze from the raw, inanimate elements to the human presence.
“Marco’s photographs are more than a document of Magazzino’s creation. The expansiveness of Marco’s approach, which embraces the project of Magazzino in all its human and material aspects, is a fitting tribute to the founders, Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu. The intricate ecosystem of artists, designers, builders, and researchers that Nancy and Giorgio have fostered is revealed in minute detail through the medium of Marco’s pictures,” Vittorio Calabrese stated.
As a result of his inclusive approach, the photographer’s intimate vision unfolded over time, proposing a constant dialogue between architecture, landscape, and the workers.
Marvin Heiferman, scholar and photography historian, expands on this dialogue in his essay for the accompanying book, Marco Anelli: Building Magazzino: “Anelli’s carefully composed photographs […] are not strictly documentary images, as they incorporate elements of landscape and still-life photography into the mix, as well as touches of poetry and humor. Ultimately, these images communicate not a clear-cut chronology, but a rumination on process, a fascination with the rhythm of work, and, most of all, Anelli’s desire to make pictures that are more meditative than spectacular.”
The photographic book Marco Anelli: Building Magazzino, published by Skira Rizzoli, is comprised of 129 color photographs and a preface by Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, along with essays by Manuel Blanco, Alberto Campo Baeza, Marvin Heiferman, Miguel Quismondo and Vittorio Calabrese. Designed by Beatriz Cifuentes of Waterhouse Cifuentes Design, Marco Anelli: Building Magazzino is available in bookstores beginning December 2017.
