©Giovanni Gastel, Untitled (Gina), 1992
Galleria del Cembalo Largo della Fontanella di Borghese, 19 00186 Rome Italie
The exhibition presents the artwork of two great exponents of Italian contemporary photography capable of mixing the fashion language with their own personal researches.
“Life is eternal movement, photography is eternal stillness. In this immense difference is its magnificence its destiny as creator of icons and of unreal, and almost magical, frames.”
Giovanni Gastel
“Photography is my muse: it seduces me because it can embrace my interior world, my desires transforming them in images.”
Toni Thorimbert
From January 24th to March 15th 2014, the Galleria del Cembalo in Rome (Largo della Fontanella Borghese, 19) hosts the exhibition Doppio gioco (Double game).
Photographs of Giovanni Gastel and Toni Thorimbert, curated by Giovanna Calvenzi.
Inside the space dedicated to photography, inaugurated in 2013 in the heart of Rome at Palazzo Borghese upon initiative of Paola Stacchini Cavazza and Mario Peliti, the exhibition presents 52 artworks of two important exponents of the Italian contemporary photography.
Opening simultaneously with the start of the high fashion Roman shows, the exposition offers a dialogue made of cross references and recalls between the experiences of the two authors capable of mixing the fashion language with personal ideas and their researches in other photography areas.
Gastel and Thorimberg surely represent two different personalities, for personal experiences and for the way of conceiving photography, which have in common accuracy, passion, mutual respect, friendship and who belong to the same generation.
Biographies
Giovanni Gastel
was born in Milan on the 27th December 1955 from Giuseppe Gastel and Ida Visconti of Modrone and was the last of seven children.
In the Seventies, he came in contact with photography for the first time. Since that moment, he started a long period of apprenticeship, until in 1975-76 he was offered the big opportunity of working with the auction house Christie’s.
The turning point was in 1981 when he met Carla Ghiglieri, who will become his agent and will introduce him to the fashion world.
After the printing of his first still-life on the magazine Annabella in 1982, he started collaborating with Vogue Italia and, later on, with the magazines Mondo Uomo and Donna, thanks to the encounter with Flavio Lucchini, director of Edimoda, and Gisella Borioli.
His high commitment with the photography world put him in contact with the Italian Association of Professional Photographers, of which he was President from 1996 to 1998. His artistic consecration arrived in 1997 when the Triennale di Milano dedicated him a solo exhibition, curated by the contemporary art historian Germano Celant.
His professional success consolidated itself in the following decade and his name appeared in specialized magazines together with major Italian photographers, such as Oliviero Toscano, Gian Paolo Barbieri, Ferdinando Scianna or by the side of Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Mario Testino and Juergen Teller.
In 2002 during the La Kore Oscar della Moda event, he received the Oscar for Photography. He currently is the president of the Italian Association of Professional Photographers and a permanent member of the Polaroid Museum of Chicago.
Toni Thorimbert
(Losanna, 1957) started to shoot when he was very young, documenting the social and political tensions of the Seventies.
During the Eighties his close collaboration with magazines, such as Max, Sette and Amica, is essential for the definition of the period’s visual standard. Being a reporter, portraitist and fashion photographer, capable of continuously reinventing his relationship with photography often forestalling trends, he holds many workshops on photography language and he was the critique curator of the exhibition Immagini dal mondo interno, a collective whose theme regarded feelings and human relationships in which eleven European photographers used photography as an active part of a process of self-analysis process and awareness of oneself. The exhibition was an event belonging to the Rencontres Internationales de Photograhie D’Arles 1998.
Following the same theme, in 2000, the volume Transfert, edited by Baldini&Castoldi, was published as an anthology dedicated the most personal work of the artist. Since that moment he continued to collaborate with international magazines such as Details, Mademoiselle, Wallpaper, and Italian ones, such as GQ, Rolling Stone, Sportweek, Io Donna, Style, and to produce prestigious ad campaigns. In 2006 Nepente Editore published Carta Stampata, a prestigious volume that gathers thirty years of fashion and portrait photography, while in 2012 he published Tabularasa, a book on Vasco Rossi’s life made with Efrem Raimondi and edited by Mondadori.
His work has been the subject of many solo exhibitions and collectives both in Italy and abroad. His photographs were acquired by the Collezione Fotografica della Città di Parigi and from several museums and organisations in Italy and abroad.