Franco Fontana
1961-2017
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition deluxe hardback:  June 2021.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
With an Italian translation by Mario Mazzoli.
150 pages, with a 4-colour gatefold jacket, a black and white photograph of the artist on the frontispiece, 63 color and black and white illustrations and 68 full-color plate reproductions.
11.5 x 11.5 x 1 in. (29.2 x 29.2 x 2.5 cm.), printed, sewn, and bound in Modena, Italy.
Modena, Italy:  Galleria Mazzoli Editore, 2021.

RETAIL PRICE: $150.00 (includes postage and handling)

On Saturday 19th June, 2021, at 5.30 p.m., Galleria Mazzoli in Modena will have the pleasure of inaugurating a major retrospective exhibition by the Modenese photographer Franco Fontana.

About seventy works by the artist, mostly unpublished, made from 1961 to 2017, will be on display. They will feature some of his most classic subjects: the famous landscapes, characterized by his interest in color and analysis of the geometry of nature, the urban and industrial scenarios of American cities, the seaside resorts with their inevitable tourists, swimming pools, shadows, and asphalt pavements.

An important selection of unpublished Polaroids, made by the artist over the years, will also be presented.
The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of two major catalogs, one focusing on the production of Fontana’s Polaroids with text by the famous Italian art historian Achille Bonito Oliva, the other on the artist’s photographic production over the course of fifty-six years, from 1961 to 2017, with a text by the American critic and independent scholar Richard Milazzo.

       Achille Bonito Oliva, in his text, describes the artist’s poetics as follows: “Fontana’s photography is not casual and instantaneous, not the result of an elementary doubling; it is instead the placement in a pose that complicates the reality from which it stems, making it ambiguous,” while Richard Milazzo points out that calling Franco Fontana’s aesthetic minimalist “is not quite right, given how full of life his images are. It is more like he is making room for us in the space of his vision, or space for us to experience small parts of the world that aspire to more universal values […]  One almost gets the sense he would like us to experience the universe in a grain of sand. Silly as that might sound, but I think this is his aspiration. A laudable aspiration, rewarded by its realization.”