Palazzo Albergati hosts exhibition on Oliviero Toscani

Oliviero Toscani is one of the artistic figures who has best portrayed society and fashion through his photographic lens: insightful, ironic and always biting.

Bologna celebrates his 80th birthday with an exhibition curated by Nicolas Ballario at Palazzo Albergati, just a few meters from our gallery stores. Throughout the summer, until Sept. 4, it will in fact be possible to visit the large celebratory exhibition featuring more than 100 photographs by the great master.

Not only fashion and costume, but Toscani, in the course of his brilliant career, has addressed, with his shots, social and topical issues such as racism, inclusion, anorexia, the death penalty, often turning the spotlight on taboo and highly sensitive subjects. Visitors will thus be able to retrace the most famous and sensational advertising campaigns that have shaken critics and national public opinion over the past decades.

There will also be lesser-known works in the exhibition halls that, with a more intimate and personal flavor, are nonetheless able to tell and reveal the man behind the artist. The exhibition, then, includes, as it should, portraits taken of the personalities and celebrities who most marked the cultural landscape from the 1970s onward. Some names? Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, Carmelo Bene, Andy Warhol, Federico Fellini as well as, of course, the most acclaimed supermodels of all time such as Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell.

After all, the Milanese artist declared this at the opening of this prestigious retrospective: “Photography is the true historical memory of society. It is a public service.” It is no coincidence, in fact, that the title of the exhibition is “Oliviero Toscani. 80 years as a Situationist” and that the entire itinerary has been designed as a synthesis of the creative flair of an artist capable of changing the rules of communication through the power of images.