ON VIEW: By appt. (Mon-Fri:10am-12/2pm-4pm), Reservations at rsvp@iicwashington.info
Dario Zucchi explores those brilliant, generally unrecognized connections between modern art and its admirers. The photographer’s search for visitors displaying the perfect combination of colors, shapes, textures, and attitudes to be juxtaposed with paintings and sculptures, yields the delight of surprise and the shock of recognition.
Introduction by Eric Denker and David Gariff, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
Musical performance by Duff Davis, guitar & David Ludman, saxophone & flute.
“The Milanese-born Washington photographer Dario Zucchi explores those brilliant, generally unrecognized connections between modern art and its admirers. Zucchi is fascinated by the subject of people looking at art. However, he reaches beyond the simple act of observation to investigate revealing segues between the observers and the observed. Zucchi is a modern big-game hunter armed with a camera who stalks his urban prey, the unusually dressed museum patron whose taste for art, perhaps unconsciously, parallels his taste in fashion. The photographer’s search for visitors displaying the perfect combination of colors, shapes, textures, and attitudes to be juxtaposed with paintings and sculptures, yields the delight of surprise and the shock of recognition. His observers are rarely posed, but caught surreptitiously in the act of looking.
Zucchi’s imagery is inspired by his affection for modern art in the great collections of museums in New York, Baltimore and Washington. With a firm knowledge and awareness of the collections, he waits patiently hoping to capture the happy conflation of observer and object central to his vision. This confrontation between observers and art works is at the core of the photographer’s vision. As viewers we perceive the creative and illuminating brilliance of the juxtapositions. Dario Zucchi’s photographs reside at the periphery of life and artifice, characterized by humor and a passion for modern art. The imagery may be playful, the equivalent of visual puns, but they are also always provocative.”
Eric Denker
*COVER IMAGE: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26 February 2013 – Roy Lichtenstein
LOCATION
Embassy of Italy
3000 Whitehaven Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
DOORS OPEN AT 6:30PM
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DARIO ZUCCHI
Dario Zucchi was born in Milan (Italy) in 1938. After High School (Classical Studies) and a degree in Economics at Universita’ Bocconi (Milan), he worked in real estate development and investment ventures in Italy, Switzerland, Canada, Mexico. In 1979 he moved with his family to the U.S.A. where he is still professionally active in the Washington D.C. area. In the past several years he has expanded his interests in cabinet making and, especially, photography. ( more )
ERIC DENKER
Eric Denker is a Senior Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, where he has been since 1978. From 1998 to 2006, he also served jointly as the Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, overseeing the permanent collection and coordinating an active exhibition schedule that included the catalogue and show of Whistler and his Circle in Venice. Eric Denker attended Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he is now a Trustee as well as the President of the Friends of the Trout Gallery. He received his doctorate from the University of Virginia. In addition to serving as an adjunct professor at Cornell University’s Washington Semester, Denker frequently lectures in Italy for the Smithsonian Institution and for the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice. He is the co-author, with Judith Martin, of the 2007 No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice, exploring the contemporary visitor’s passions for the unique lagoon city. He is the author of numerous articles for guidebooks about Venice and Italy. In 2011 he curated for the IIC Washington the exhibition The Heirs of Canaletto. Fabio Mauroner and Emanuele Brugnoli in Venice, 1905-1940, at the Embassy of Italy.
DAVID GARIFF
David Gariff is a senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and an adjunct professor of art history at the Catholic University of America. A specialist in modern and contemporary art and the art of the Italian Renaissance, he has taught art history at the University of Wisconsin, Cleveland State University, Trinity University, and the University of Maryland, College Park, where he received his Ph.D. He was a graduate fellow in Italy at the University of Florence and the University of Pisa, and a Fulbright and Kress Foundation fellow at the Institute for the History of Lombard Art in Milan. Gariff has lectured and written widely on topics related to modern art, film, and the Italian Renaissance; his 2008 book The World’s Most Influential Painters and the Artists They Inspired explores the theme of artistic influence and inspiration in Western painting.
DAVID LUDMAN
David Ludman studied Jazz at the New School in New York City. He spent several years in Benin, W. Africa where he founded the jazz group Modern Village. He is a member of the New Orleans-based funk and R&B group Soul Project NOLA, and he performs Jazz, African, Funk, Reggae and Latin music with several DC area bands.
DUFF DAVIS
Guitarist and percussionist Duff Davis loves playing many styles of music from baroque counterpoint to lovers rock. He attempts to find common ground with the listener and to integrate many different musical and life experiences into his music. While experimentation always remains important, he seeks to respect and understand the roots and histories of many musical traditions.
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