With the “Transparency” exhibition by Israeli photographer Michael Ackerman, the project of “bringing art to the road” as an open-air museum, visible to passers-by 24 hours a day, kicks off.
ADEC ARTE in collaboration with Mc2gallery is pleased to present the exhibition of the Israeli photographer Michael Ackerman, “Fluctuating silhouettes”, curated by Davide Di Maggio, in collaboration with Claudio Composti, an important opportunity to see and meet one of the most interesting artists of the international photography through a selection of some of the most significant photographs of recent years, specially chosen by the artist and curator.
In Michael Ackerman’s work, documentary and autobiography combine to fiction, and everything dissolves into hallucination. His photography has always been crossed by ordinary and extraordinary themes: time and timelessness, personal history and the history of places returned through deteriorated and damaged images, not as a stylistic choice but as an analogue reference to experience, which is never uncontaminated. His particular journeys span New York, Havana, Berlin, Naples, Paris, Warsaw and Krakow, but the places are not necessarily recognizable.
For some time now, in his photographs, Ackerman has been moving towards the cancellation of geographical and other distinctions with the desire to move away from the restrictions of the traditional documentary method. If Ackerman’s work appears hard at first glance, the landscapes bring us back to a balanced delicacy, a confidence in beauty. The artist has a deep interest in the archaic snow-covered trains that cross Europe and that have passed through it, especially Eastern Europe. Today, on these trains, you travel hundreds of kilometers, but during the journey you are nowhere and, in winter, you float in the midst of the whiteness, which inevitably contrasts and reminds us of the terrible freight trains of deportations Nazis, with sealed wagons, which during the Second World War incessantly traveled the same routes. The same candor but very different perception.
White, strongly vignetted, and black characterize all of his work, creating muffled, almost foggy atmospheres where the figures appear unreal in the reality that surrounds them.
In recent years Ackerman has explored the concrete changes and the dreamy dimension of his close family, wife and daughter. These images, very amorous, intimate and inevitably daring, echo with sincerity, warmth, simple eroticism and of course love. Also in this case the images contrast with the harsh and disturbing visions of the photographs of soldiers marching into the unknown, of a bombed house, of male figures taking a shower, which bring to mind prisoners in concentration camps. Or the emblematic image of an elderly waiter who elegantly wanders with his lost gaze in a deserted city and the series of portraits – which will be exhibited in the exhibition – of men who depict the evidence of contemporary discomfort, twisted in grimaces of pain or with the gazes lost in the void, more portraits of souls that represent what is left after life has passed.
All images that tell us about the fatigue of living, the restlessness of difficult times and the fear of living them.
Fear is mixed with audacity, joy involves a bit of trepidation, innocence is absolutely real, but tangled and fleeting. However, at the end of this journey, the feeling is still one of harmony and reflection.
Ackerman faces harsh reality and photographs it without filters and without lies. If Proust said that the things we hear and see are always left on the threshold of the sentences we say, Ackerman’s work puts the observer in the best position to metabolize and analyze them, helping him to overcome this threshold, the thin line of shadow that separates the balance from madness.
Opening:
24 maggio 2022 alle 18.00
May 24 2022, at 6 pm
Via E. de Amicis, 28 I Milano
