february 08, 2021 - Fondazione Pistoia Musei

FONDAZIONE PISTOIA MUSEI presents AURELIO AMENDOLA | An Anthology. Michelangelo, Burri, Warhol and the others

A tribute to the sixty years of the career of the photographer of Michelangelo, a show with more than two hundred works from 1960 until today

Curated by

Paola Goretti and Marco Meneguzzo

8 February – 25 July 2021

Fondazione Pistoia Musei
Palazzo Buontalenti and the Antico Palazzo dei Vescovi

Pistoia 8 February 2021. The antique, the ancient, the avant-garde, the contemporary, the happenings of the 1970s, the studios, the maze of friends and collaborations, the large shows, the small museums: with AURELIO AMENDOLA | An anthology. Michelangelo, Burri, Warhol and the others, an anthological show devoted to a master of Italian photography, that from 8 February to 25 July 2021 the Fondazione Pistoia Musei will present in its two venues of Palazzo Buontalenti e and the Antico Palazzo dei Vescovi. Beauty recounted in almost three hundred images.

Aurelio Amendola, an expert experimenter of new juxtapositions of the old and the contemporary, is among the most elegant and prolific photographers of our times: his images have a strength that is millions of years old and, at the same time, they transmit pure grace and melody.

The show by the Fondazione Pistoia Musei aims at being a tribute to the career of a photographer of great intensity, one able to transform natural elements into metaphors for sensuality and carnality, solidly anchored to the Tuscan cultural context and to his Pistoia in particular. However he is not only an artist of the genius loci but aninterpreter of universal creativity.

AURELIO AMENDOLA | An anthology. Michelangelo, Burri, Warhol and the others is articulated in two large parts – Antique and Contemporary – linked to continuous figurative allusions that range over more than sixty years of activity and cover all the genres which the author has experimented, studied in specific sections of the show.

We are dealing with the first exhibition to collect together almost the whole of Amendola’s output, giving the public the possibility of admiring his figurative coherence, as well as his links to the classical tradition of art history and the photography of the great contemporary masters.

The photographer of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Uffizi, the Vatican museums, the FMR magazine, the Vittoriale degli Italiani, and of numerous other national and international museum institutions, and tied to many artists of the 20^th century, Aurelio Amendola is a photographer of international fame, the photos by whom are not simple reproductions but are similar to the practice of sculpture and its harmony: it is volume and sensuality.

The interpreter par excellence of the work by Michelangelo, a sublime witness to antiquity in his shots of Canova, Bernini, Jacopo della Quercia, Donatello, and Giovanni Pisano, and of contemporaneity with his portraits of Burri, de Chirico, Warhol, Manzù, Vedova, Ceroli, Lichtenstein, Kounellis, and many others, Amendola has been able to enter into a dialogue with the spirit of the artists, revealing us their style and intensity.

Far distant from documentary models, and with the special grace of the atmospheric and sensorial quality of his shots, the photography of Aurelio Amendola is never an aesthetic object but a poetic act, at the same time carnal and spiritual, meditative and seductive.