Vistamare is pleased to present Playgrounds, Linda Fregni Nagler’s second solo exhibition at the gallery venue in Pescara.
Playgrounds is a photographic project that started in 2005 and is still ongoing. The series – exhibited in 2023 on the occasion of the 6th Biennal of Photography on Industry and Labour promoted by MAST Foundation and enriched here with unseen works – consists of images of playgrounds captured at night in different places around the world. These spaces, in the absence of the child audience that normally animates them, lose their function and become outsized architectures or uninhabited neighborhoods. In Fregni Nagler’s photographs, the chromatic vivacity and lightheartedness typical of these recreational installations give way to an enigmatic and dark atmosphere of suspension. In this project the artist explores the photographic medium itself, its transformative power and its ability to generate new visions.
Linda Fregni Nagler is an artist who primarily works with the photographic medium. She was born in Stockholm and lives in Milan, where she graduated in 2000 from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Her work is a search for the origins of the modern gaze and focuses on photography and its history through a practice that weaves together the roles of artist, scholar, and collector. Her studio is, above all, a place of reception rather than mere production, where, after a meticulous process of selection and collection, photographs are gathered to be reinterpreted and reactivated, thus acquiring new meanings. Her field of interest ranges from the theory to the materiality of the photographic image, from the history of photography to the study of iconographic conventions and visual clichés, from anonymous and vernacular imagery to appropriation as a contemporary artistic practice.
She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace (2013), curated by Massimiliano Gioni; in Italian institutions (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, MAXXI Rome, Fondazione Olivetti Rome, Triennale Milano, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale Turin) and abroad (Moderna Museet Stockholm, Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Columbia University NY, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg).
Alongside her artistic practice, she has cultivated a historical research activity that led her, between 2012 and 2017, to develop a project on the photography pioneer Hercule Florence and, consequently, to curate—together with Cristiano Raimondi—the exhibition Hercule Florence, Le Nouveau Robinson at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. In 2007, she was awarded the New York Prize by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Columbia University. In 2008, she won a residency at the Dena Foundation in Paris; in 2014, she was awarded a residency at Iaspis (Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists) in Stockholm; and in 2016, she received the ACACIA Prize.
Linda Fregni Nagler is a tenured professor of Photography at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, and she also teaches “Photography: Theories and Techniques” at IULM University in Milan.