Art Basel

For this unprecedented presentation at the occasion of Art Basel 2025, Polka Gallery presents an exclusive selection of unique vintage prints. The works of these artists engage in a dialogue, along a single horizon line: a reinterpretation as sensitive as it is fascinating of the Italian landscape plowed by the modern world.

After long being considered artistic suicide, abstract photography was resurrected at the dawn of the 1970s, blossoming from the artistic codes set by some American precursors. In Europe, several Italian artists, unknown to each other at the time, simultaneously began to develop a new photographic language that approached the principles of abstract expressionism. In it, photography was able to surpass the limits of its objectivity and the notions of reproducibility that lie at its essence.

The task is more difficult for the photographer than for the painter, because as Helmut Gernsheim writes in his preface to Franco Fontana’s book «Skyline» (the artist’s first book, published personally by Luigi Ghirri at Punto e virgola editions in 1978), « every creative photograph is a partial abstraction of nature, a constant process of elimination».

Franco Fontana and Luigi Ghirri occupy a singular and essential place in the history of Italian photography. Since the 1970s, both have profoundly renewed the photographic gaze by proposing a reading of reality that is no longer documentary, but conceptual and artistic. For them, photography is not just a tool for recording the world: it becomes an instrument of thought, a means of questioning the way in which we see, perceive and represent our environment.