Galleria Bianconi is pleased to present “Lo spazio del respiro” (The Space of a Breath), a solo exhibition of works by Michele Zaza, curated by Claudia Löffelholz, which opens on 24 May in Via Lecco 20, Milan (opening from 6 to 9 p.m., runs until 8 September).
The show will stress the importance of the artist’s current production, with two previously unexhibited installations specially created for the gallery premises. They create an intriguing journey that interacts with Zaza's historic section, an anticipate the artist's anthological exhibition that will follow in the autumn at the Galleria De Primi Fine Art in Lugano, highlighting the consistency and relevance of Zaza’s research and his decisive role in the world of international photography.

“Lo spazio del respiro”, a new project in Michele Zaza’s incessant research, gives the exhibition its title. An evocative installation of photographs and sculptural elements will transform the central space of Galleria Bianconi into a setting brought to life by the key elements in the artist’s inner poetic vision: the face, hands and body, with their various artistic forms of presentation, opening up an introspective vision of the experiences and values of the human species. These almost iconographic images bring together and sum up the entire story of existence and of being.

The narrative theme continues on the basement floor with site-specific work: in the half-light of the space, the visitor is taken into a sort of blue womb between two projections, one opposite the other, in which the video becomes a “breathing image” (Michele Zaza). Two disjunctive moments that reveal two faces – one male and one female. These archetypes complete each other in a metaphysical universe of primeval stories and experiences. With joined hands slowly opening, figures inhabit the arcane dimension of a magical space: “A representation that brings together earth, sky, man and conscience. A sort of lost paradise of childhood and beauty that opens up to a rediscovered anthropological fairytale, where beings venture beyond themselves” (Michele Zaza).

The historical section includes previously unexhibited cycles of Michele Zaza's photographs of the 1970s. His existential reflections, which concentrate on the dimension of the body and, in particular, on his own face and on those of people close to him, already appear in these works. An imaginary universe enters into a network of natural relationships laden with chromatic symbolism and references, (re)awakening the mythical and mystical dimension of man and of universal adventures that, whether or not we know it, are in all of us.

This exhibition is a further step in the partnership between Galleria Bianconi and one of the most important Italian artists of the past forty years, with an exhibition project that represents a new fusion of the Gallery’s historical programme, which is devoted in particular to the great figures of twentieth-century Italian art, and its research into contemporary developments.
The exhibition comes after “Michele Zaza. Il Sogno del Viaggiatore”, the solo show curated by Flaminio Gualdoni in 2009, and the tribute the Gallery paid to Zaza last year on the occasion of the Photofestival in Milan, with a selection of the artist’s work dating from 1970 to 2010, including his Neo Terrestre of 1979.