Connecticut HQ Art

Olivo Barbieri is a photographer whose work destabilizes our understanding of human relationships to urban and natural environments. site specific_LAS VEGAS 05 (2005) is from Barbieri’s 10-year project recording cities throughout the world in aerial photographs. Taken from a helicopter and utilizing a large format camera with a tilt-shift lens, these works reduce vast metropolises to mere models. Whereas many tilt-shift photographs put the center of the composition in focus, in his image of Las Vegas, Barbieri crisply renders the snow-dusted mountains in the distance. The New York New York hotel and casino in the foreground is a blurry apparition that seems to shimmer in the desert heat. Barbieri comments on the unreality of the Las Vegas landscape while at the same time demonstrating the casino strip’s relationship to the surrounding region. Using additional devices, such as manipulating color or deleting specific details, Barbieri aims to disrupt visual perception, creating a disorientation akin to vertigo. In doing so, Barbieri highlights the ambiguity of all vision, ultimately forcing us to consider the relationship between reality and representation.

Barbieri studied at the University of Bologna. He lives and works in Modena, Italy. He has exhibited widely, including at the Venice Biennale (1993, 1995, 1997, 2011, 2013), and at institutions such as Hayward Gallery, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MART), Rovereto, Italy.

His photographs and films are in the permanent collections of the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; International Center of Photography, New York, NY; and Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM), Turin, Italy.