Gabriele Maria Pagnini's portraits on display at Malpensa
PhotoSquare Milano Malpensa hosts the exhibition dedicated to Gabriele Maria Pagnini, an Italian photographer among the great interpreters of the editorial portrait of the second half of the twentieth century. The exhibition brings together over one hundred portraits of protagonists of culture, art, music, cinema and entertainment.
The exhibition offers passengers in transit and external visitors the opportunity to meet a gallery of faces that have marked the international cultural imagination. Among the subjects photographed are Federico Fellini, Andy Warhol, Italo Calvino, Wim Wenders, Roberto Benigni, Dario Fo, David Hockney, Riccardo Muti, Allen Ginsberg, Catherine Deneuve, Luciano Pavarotti, Isabella Rossellini and Jeanne Moreau.
The images on display tell the story of an era through the language of photographic portraiture. Many of Pagnini's works have been published in international publications such as Vogue, L'Uomo Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Ritz Newspaper, the magazine edited by David Bailey. The exhibition thus restores the cultural value of editorial photography and its ability to transform the face of an artist, a writer or an interpreter into a collective visual memory.
Gabriele Maria Pagninhas built a personal style over time, born from the experience of reportage and a sensitivity close to painting. His photographs, often in black and white, are not limited to the representation of the public figure, but seek a more intimate dimension, made up of intensity, fragility and psychological presence.
Born in Rome in 1946, Pagnini approached photography in 1966 during his university years in Ancona. After his beginnings in journalism and collaborations with newspapers and magazines such as Epoca, Panorama, L'Espresso, Oggi and L'Europeo, in the early seventies he moved to Milan, where he worked with Vogue and L'Uomo Vogue creating about two thousand portraits. In 1990 he moved to New York, collaborating with the Rizzoli Group and Vanity Fair USA.
The PhotoSquare Malpensa exhibition also highlights the role of the airport as an accessible cultural space. Not only a place of departure and arrival, but also an environment open to art, photography and discovery, capable of offering Travellers a cultural experience before or after the flight.
With the tribute to Gabriele Maria Pagnini, Milano Malpensa (MXP) offers a journey into contemporary portraiture and the visual memory of the second half of the twentieth century, through the gazes of personalities who have contributed to writing the history of international culture.
