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Ruediger Glatz

REFLECTING PASOLINI

Curated by Alessio de’Navasques

Palazzo delle Esposizioni - Roma
8 July > 4 September 2022

Palazzo delle Esposizioni will be hosting the first one-man show of work in Italy by Ruediger Glatz, curated by Alessio de’Navasques and showcasing over 60 black and white photographs devoted to Pier Paolo Pasolini.
THE EXHIBITION, PROMOTED BY ROMA CULTURE AND ORGANISED BY THE AZIENDA SPECIALE PALAEXPO, WITH TENDERSTORIES CONTRIBUTION, IS PART OF THE ROME CAPITAL CITY CULTURAL AFFAIRS DEPARTMENT’S PPP1000 PROGRAMME OF EVENTS COORDINATED WITH THE CULTURAL ACTIVITIES DEPARTMENT.
Adopting a clinical, almost scientific approach that appears to echo a certain German photographic tradition right up to the poetic need to convey reality typical of Subjektive Photographie, Ruediger Glatz takes his measure of the great Italian thinker in a process of rapprochement, refraction and reflection.

Using that unpredictable “magical quality” of photography that Walter Benjamin called “the tiny spark of accident”, Ruediger Glatz has succeeded in recording the strength of absence in a performance entitled Embodying Pasolini, presented in the spaces of the Mattatoio in Rome in June 2021. In an action unfolding in several phases, actress and performer Tilda Swinton and curator and fashion historian Olivier Saillard explored, through the sculptural monumentality of Danilo Donati’s costumes, the memory of Pasolini’s characters who had worn them.

A complete cycle of photographs conjures up the performance experience in the Mattatoio as thought it were a “time room” where Glatz’s lens has managed to capture the magnetism of the action. Through the use of extended or multiple exposures, he uses doubles and reflections to convey the transfiguration of the actress in the pathos of her peformance: the moment of the action and Swinton’s own enigmatic face become a reflecting device, a punctum that fertilises the photographer’s creativity, triggering a process of exploration and familiarisation with Pasolini’s work as a reflection and refraction of that action.

Whence the exhibition title Reflecting Pasolini and the idea for the project, which is completed with the cycle of photographs entitled On PPP: the images of the places that Ruediger Glatz encountered while touring Italy in search of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s imagination in a emotional journey, juxtaposing the past with the present.

Glatz has imparted new depiction and new meaning to the references to the painting of Piero Della Francesca and Giotto in Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo, to the lights of the buildings in the Quadraro and Centocelle in such films as Mamma Roma or Accattone or the shadows of Villa Feltrinelli, Mussolini’s last abode on the shores of Lake Como that inspired Salò.

The essence of the sites, of the solitary landscapes, of nature-culture, like denaturalised spaces, has spawned a personal atlas of myths and emotions in an intimate and literary dimension of such places as the house in Bologna where the poet was born or the Torre di Chia, the beloved retreat where he wrote Petrolio. 

RUEDIGER GLATZ

Born in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1975, Ruediger Glatz developed an interest in photography as a form of artistic expression in 2000, after having previously been an active graffiti writer. Setting out from this most traditional form of documentation, he proceeded to develop his own personal idea of photography as a conceptual portrait, photographing almost exclusively in black and white and using extended and mutiple exposure to emphasise his vision through the flow of time.

Since 2009 he has been working a project entitled The New Black, conceived as a portrait of the world of fashion. In that context, since 2012 his lens has recorded all the performance projects devised and developed by curator and fashion historian Olivier Saillard with the performer Tilda Swinton: The Impossible Wardrobe, Eternity Dress (2013), Cloakroom (2014), Sur-Exposition with Charlotte Rampling (2016) and Embodying Pasolini (2021–2).
His most important exhibitions include: his one-man shows: Sehr Gute Hunde, Forum Kunst Rottweil (2010), Wonderful World, Kunst/Halle Heidelberg (2011), Confrontation – Dark Thoughts and Moments of Light, Golden Hands Gallery Hamburg (2015), Characters, Palazzo Gianfigliazzi Florence (2017) and Addicted2Click, Barlach Halle K Hamburg (2021). He has also taken part in the following collective exhibitions: The Walls Belong To Us, Powerhouse Arena New York (2007), Young Blood, Forum Kunst Rottweil (2008), Tomorrow Ain’t Promised, Heidelberger Kunstverein (2009), Insights3, Kunst/Halle Heidelberg (2012), Cafe De Flores, Galerie Anne & Just Jaeckin Paris (2016) and Les Images Perdues, Arles (2020).
He has been living and working in Hamburg since 2014.