A striking new collection of Massimo Vitali’s photographs will be unveiled at Brancolini Grimaldi on 18 November in the artist’s first UK solo exhibition since 1997. Vitali will present at the art gallery new images taken on his extensive travels around Italy, Spain and Greece this summer, alongside works from the last two years previously unseen in the UK. Vitali has become one of the most celebrated contemporary photographers in Europe today, renowned for his large colour prints depicting the crowded beaches and shorelines of the Mediterranean Sea. However, this new series relocates Vitali’s crowds from the urban beach to an unscathed natural landscape reminiscent of romantic nineteenth century landscape painting.

In this new body of work, that we will see at the Isabella Brancolini and Camilla Grimaldi art gallery, Vitali explore backgrounds that celebrate stark, natural beauty. Waterfalls, caves, quarries and monumental sedimentary rock

faces are the new settings. His signature swarms of sun worshippers and socialites continue to occupy the foreground of these epic sweeps, but their backdrops are no longer an encroaching threat, they are a confidently vast and theatrically beautiful comfort.

Vitali’s photographs are generally seen as hedonistic - celebratory of sun, sea and sand – but, once scrutinized, offer a vivid and unsettling critique of society. His candid shots are often realized in a bleached-out, almost clinical hue which seems to magnify the camera’s reach and expose a playful throng of tourists as a claustrophobic horde. Urban buildings and man-made structures skirt the periphery of these small snatches of paradise; the urban often consuming the rural, the man-

made turning against man.

By placing human activity against visibly ancient backdrops, Vitali is suggesting two different time dimensions: that of the earth and all its history (one that can eclipse the presence of humanity); and that of humanity (temporal, fleeting, and yet capable of colossal impact upon the environment it occupies). Paul Wombell , exhibition curator at the Brancolini Grimaldi art gallery, explains "it is widely accepted that we have entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene. This age is defined by human impact on the earth, such as the effects of farming and agriculture, the industrial revolution and, more recently, greenhouse gas emissions. This emphasizes the transitory nature of life, quietly suggesting that, in time, all humans will eventually become strata within the rock formations they are pictured with.

We may well be watching the new age of Anthropocene taking shape in Vitali’s photographs".

Vitali was born in Como, Italy, in 1944. He worked as a photojournalist in the early sixties and enjoyed a career in cinematography for television and cinema in the 1980s. After working with large format photography in 1993, Vitali commenced his series of Italian beach panoramas in 1995,

coinciding with a period of dramatic political change in Italy. Since then he had major solo exhibitions around the world and his prints are included in various major international collections.

Massimo Vitali currently lives and works in Lucca, Italy, and in Berlin, Germany.

For more informations: Brancolini Grimaldi