Mount Analogue. Michelangelo Antonioni and Luigi Ghirri

Named after René Daumal’s unfinished novel (1952), which tells the story of a utopian expedition of eight people in search of a mysterious, inaccessible mountain, the exhibition – previously shown at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona – stems from a desire to explore the work of Michelangelo Antonioni and Luigi Ghirri, starting from the affinities found between the pictorial output of the great filmmaker and the work of the renowned photographer.

By comparing the ‘Enchanted Mountains’ series – developed by Antonioni between the 1970s and 1980s by photographically enlarging small-scale works on paper – with Ghirri’s early photographs taken during his travels in the 1970s, the exhibition brings into dialogue two leading figures of twentieth-century Italian culture, united by a vision capable of questioning the landscape, exploring the dimensions of emptiness and anticipation, to the point of constructing images that seem to hold time still.

Antonioni and Ghirri share, in fact, a poetic approach that transforms reality into a mental and perceptual experience: in their works, the setting is never merely a backdrop, but a symbolic place, a suspended territory, a space of imagination and enigma. The exhibition thus takes the form of a journey of discovery through