Artist Entry #7: Olivo Barbieri

Artist Entry #7: Olivo Barbieri

I came across Barbieri’s book called Artificial Illumninations in the library where I was looking for books on night photography. I really enjoyed this book, and I think that his photographs at night are really interesting. Someon

e mentioned in my critique the other week that they liked how two of the images you had trouble telling if they were during the day or night, and I think Barbieri’s have the same quality.

"Olivio Barberi was born in 1954 in Italy and began to exhibit in 1978. In 1993, 1995 and 1997, he was part of the Venice Biennale and also numerous international contemporary visual Art Fairs. In 1996, the Folkwang Museum of Essen did a retrospective of his work. In 2003, he participated in "Strangers", the first Triennale of Photography and Video organised by the International Centre of Photography ICP in New York. In 2003, he began the project "Site_specific" which involved several cities including Rome, Montreal, Ammam, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Shanghai and Seville."

“the images convey the nocturnal fever, the feverish state of the one who has dreamed, produced, retaken them, seeing them first in the dream of the technological half closed eye of Rimbaud, in the blurring of Kasper Hauser’s magic super-8 or of Herzog’s Fata Morgana. Night, kingdom of the subjective of the arbitrary, of the darkness, to imagine or to fill, becomes a hallucination of objectivity and of precision.” (p.vi) Enrico Ghezzi

Barbieri, Olivo, and Enrico Ghezzi. Artificial Illuminations. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1998. Print.

“if we are aware of the process, then we know why Barbieri’s pictures in the night strike us so strongly, well beyond the suspicion of a technical artifice, of a recoloration, of a trickery of “edition”. Adopting time as a set, in the already expanded and deserted dimension of the night, the pictures manage to give time itself in the image of the night, a before, a during, and an after of the light. Nothing moves because it is time that moves.” (p. vi-vii)

Barbieri, Olivo, and Enrico Ghezzi. Artificial Illuminations. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1998. Print.

Link to a review of his project “Site Specific”: http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/11706-olivo-barbieri-site-specific

Gallery Representation: http://www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/olivo-barbieri/index.html

Artist’s Site: http://www.olivobarbieri.it/index.html