Vistamare is proud to present SENZA RUGHE, Armin Linke’s fourth solo exhibition in Pescara.
The exhibition reflects the gallery’s intention to focus on projects connected with its local surroundings: ‘Senza rughe’ can be literally translated as ‘unwrinkled’ and is the incisive phrase with which, in La favola pitagorica, the writer Giorgio Manganelli describes the city of Pescara – a perennially youthful city without a past, which the author chooses as the starting point for an offbeat journey travelling the length and breadth of Abruzzo.
Armin Linke sets off across Abruzzo in a similar way, uncovering a wealth of inherited identities linked with places and with the land, in a portrait of the region seen through a lens which is focused on the point where photographic images and collective memory intersect.
The 24 photographs presented in the exhibition form a series of ‘notes and sketches’: an exhibition project composed over the course of a long series of travels, which turn out to have been dialogues.
The individual images are fragments of a journey in which Abruzzo is revealed to be a place in which landscapes and physiognomies are forged over the course of the seasons and moulded from the stereotypical images of the region. Traces of the past, like those Linke finds in the historical villages of Città Sant’Angelo and Pescocostanzo, are seen in juxtaposition with the satellite control systems on the vast plain of the Piana del Fucino, and the mountain vistas of the Majella and the Gran Sasso.
Linke’s images of the region are far from ‘elegiac’, but while they are empty of any human presence, these landscapes bear the wordless signs of human passage. In his photographs there emerges all the ancestral potency of a now-remote land which Manganelli himself defined as the “great manufacturer of silence”.
Linke continues to focus on the exploration of landscape and territory, which began in Matera in 2019, during the city’s year as European Capital of Culture, with his exhibition Blind Sensorium.
Armin Linke was born in Milan in 1966. A filmmaker and photographer, his work has been exhibited all over the world: the German Pavillion at the XXII Triennale di Milano, Milan (IT), ZKM Karlsruhe (DE), PAC Milan (IT), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (DE), Centre de la photographie Genève, Geneva (CH), and at the Venice Biennale (IT). In 2017 he was commissioned to work on a three-year project for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary TBA21 (AT) and in 2019 he won the Kubus Sparda Art Prize (DE). His installation “Alpi” won the special prize for the best work in its section at the IX Venice Architecture Biennale. His work is included in numerous public collections, as the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, AT, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, DE, Kunstmuseum Munich, DE, BAK, Utrecht, NL, Guggenheim, New York, US, MAXXI, Rome, IT, Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt, DE, GAM, Turin, IT, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, CAN, FRAC, FR, Centre Pompidou, FR and the Tate Modern, UK. He lives and works in Berlin.