Nuova Galleria Morone presents Paola Mattioli’s personal exhibition 

SETTANTAVOLTESETTE curated by Vittoria Coen. 

In the year of her seventieth birthday, the artist’s career, which began in the second half of the Seventies, is remembered.

The exhibition is articulated in a path that summarizes in about seventy photographs (almost all in black and white) the artistic career of the photographer, through a selection of some works drawn from her most renowned series Autoritratti (1977), Carcere (1999), Nanetti (2000), Capolavoro (2003).

The project and its architecture are part of Paola Mattioli’s research, who  dealt with political and current topics, even very strong ones, but never with the mind of the reporter, instead with an inward look more concerned with a deep investigation that interests the subject represented and its narration.

The artist’s love for Ugo Mulas and for the American Lee Miller confirms, in fact, that the strength of the idea is the only one capable of transforming photography in art in all respects, doing without emotion.

Between figuration and abstraction, the path of the images seen “at a thin distance” unfolds, as the title of one of her personal exhibitions of 2008 says. They are assembled as in a game of free associations in which shadows and lights, empty and full, geometries and faces are chasing each other without interruption.

An open artwork, therefore, to be reread even years after its realization. 

Born in 1948, Paola Mattioli lives and works in Milan where she studied philosophy and graduated with a thesis about the photographic language. Since the 70s, she has been exploring theoretical and political fields ranging from questioning to seeing language, to female difference, from worker labor to the sediments of history. Among the main exhibitions and publications: Ungaretti (1972); Immagini del no (1974); Ci vediamo mercoledì (1978); Cellophane (1979); Statuine (1987); Donne irritanti (1995); Regine d’Africa (2004); Fabbrico (2006); Dalmine (2008); Una sottile distanza (2008); Mémoires d’Afrique (20013); Altra misura. Arte, fotografia e femminismo in Italia negli anni Settanta (2015); Cristina Casero, Paola Mattioli, sguardo critico di una fotografa (2016).