Thomas Dane Gallery presents Felicità, an exhibition dedicated to Luigi Ghirri and curated by Alessio Bolzoni and Luca Guadagnino. Conceived as a deeply personal and rigorous exploration of Ghirri’s practice, the exhibition brings together a significant group of photographs, including many previously unseen works drawn directly from the artist’s archive.
Bolzoni, whose curatorial research engages closely with photography’s contemporary languages, and Guadagnino, internationally recognised for his cinematic sensitivity to space, atmosphere, and perception, approach Ghirri not as a historical figure to be celebrated through iconic images alone, but as a radically modern thinker.
As they state: “Luigi Ghirri was not a photographer; he was an artist who used photography. Photography works with reality, and Ghirri was able to create a language and a philosophical tool that allowed him to use the elements of his reality to create a masterful body of work that transcended its limits. This exhibition does not seek the perfect shot for which he became famous, but rather the flaws, the research, the repetitions and the abstraction of his vision; it reveals the logic and function of one of the most poetic artists of the twentieth century.”

Installed across the gallery’s two spaces, Felicità reflects this curatorial position. Rather than focusing exclusively on Ghirri’s most celebrated landscapes of Emilia-Romagna, the exhibition foregrounds his sustained investigation into surface, framing, and representation. Postcards, magazine fragments, mirrors reflecting mirrors, torn posters, road signs and cropped atlas pages point to his awareness of a world increasingly mediated by images—an intuition that anticipates later theoretical reflections such as Simulacra and Simulation. For Ghirri, photography was not simply descriptive but analytical: a means of questioning how reality is constructed through representation.
The exhibition traces a movement from near-abstract compositions concerned with the circulation of images to interiors and landscapes that subtly destabilise perspective. Wallpapers, architectural details, and studio views flatten space into planes resembling printed pages, reinforcing Ghirri’s understanding of the photograph as both window and surface. His landscapes, while rooted in familiar territory, resist nostalgia and instead reveal a self-aware engagement with the codes of tourist and vernacular photography. In this respect, his work resonates with the cinematic atmospheres of Red Desert and with conceptual strategies later explored by artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
What emerges from Felicità is a portrait of Ghirri as an artist whose rigor, curiosity, and philosophical depth remain strikingly contemporary. His images, meticulously composed yet deceptively understated, invite viewers to reflect on their own role within the processes of perception and image-making.
A bilingual publication accompanying the exhibition will be released by MACK, featuring works from Felicità alongside three essays by Ghirri, with texts in English and Italian.