Madrid (1993) is one of the photographs that Gabriele Basilico took in the Spanish capital in 1993. It was exhibited at the Oliva Arauna Gallery in 2005, along with twelve photos that he took in Naples, Milan, Buenos Aires, Buffalo, Lausanne, Madrid and Berlin over several years. Fifteen copies were published in each series.
Nearly all his large photographs, except those of Buenos Aires, were in landscape format, providing a framing adjusted to a nearly monumental building; he thus sought to reflect a viewpoint formed inside the city, i.e. an urban viewpoint. This format comes from his work in the Naples underground, which he carried out with Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva.
Basilico did not portray the well-known places of a city, its monuments or tourist sights, but rather anthropomorphised it to some extent: ‘I see a city as a large body that breathes, a body growing, in transformation, and I strive to grasp the signs, like a doctor investigating changes in the human body. I am always searching for new points of view, as if the city were a maze and the eye were looking for an entry point’. Madrid, the photograph held in the Collection, is a shot of the back of the Círculo de Bellas Artes. The image stresses the human point of view, that of the flâneur who strolls along and turns into a street without knowing – or caring – where it will take him.
Other works by Gabriele Basilico