Guido Guidi

Guido Guidi (born in Cesena, close to Ravenna, in 1941) studied at the Corso Superiore di Disegno Industriale and at Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV). After some experimentation with photography, he began to devote himself wholly to it and he became a major figure of contemporary Italian photography. In his house in Ronta – his starting point and source of inspiration – an impressive archive grew. He drew on multiple sources to nourish his work: the history of painting, architecture, and photography. From contemporary architecture to Renaissance painting, including Italian neorealism and conceptual art, Guido Guidi revisits themes such as the landscape, the portrait, and the still life, with unprecedented visual agility. One of the artist’s lesson has inspired the exhibition title Col tempo, “with time”, a lesson in which he weaves, among others, links between a portrait of Giorgione (La Vecchia,1506) and photographs of the vernacular culture that Walker Evans cherished so much. Working with repetitions and sequences, his images comprise insistence, to-ings and fro-ings, and temporality. Guido Guidi’s “contrary” photographs resist speech. They intermingle the pleasure of construction with the absorption of the photographic event. Col Tempo follows the exhibition Veramente,presented at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, and at the Museo d'Arte della città in Ravenna. This new exhibition gathers a large number of images presented for the first time: colour prints of the period and black-and-white images, selected from contact sheets that the artist has revisited. Dating from the 1970s and 80s, these square-format images are presented along with a large selection of colour, small-format contacts – photographs made using an 8x10 view camera.

On the occasion of this exhibition, the Fondation A Stichting and Toluca Editions, Paris take great pleasure in announcing the publication of the artist’s book, Guido Guidi, 8x10.