Olivo Barbieri Italian, 1954

Olivo Barbieri (Carpi, Italy, 1954)

Barbieri attended the Faculty of Pedagogy and DAMS in Bologna.

From the 1970s onwards, he developed his interest in photography, focusing his research on artificial lighting in European and Oriental cities.

In 1978 he began exhibiting his work both in Italy and abroad. In the early 1980s he began to travel regularly to the Far East, especially to China, developing research, still ongoing, on the themes of the great changes taking place and their representation.

In 1984 he took part in Viaggio in Italia promoted by Luigi Ghirri, a seminal exhibition and book for European photography.
Since the mid-1990s, he has adopted a photographic technique that allows him to keep only certain points of the image in focus.
The Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany, dedicated a large retrospective to him in 1996, followed by the major exhibition at MAXXI in 2015 that also includes the site specific_ project undertaken by the artist since 2003.
The site specific_ series (2003-2023), photographs and films, is a global research on the form of the contemporary city, realised from a helicopter, involving more than 60 cities and megacities around the world.

The investigated cities seen as a temporary installation where centre and periphery, structures and infrastructures, a fundamental part of our sense of belonging and identity, seen from above appear as a miniature, a scale model where hierarchical relationships, in terms of space and importance, are questioned and re-imagined in an unprecedented way.

The artist exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1993, 1995, 1997 and 2103.

Two films from the series site-specific_ are part of the MoMA New York collection.

More than 50 monographs and catalogues have been published on the artist's work.

Works by Barbieri can be found in museums and public and private art collections in Europe, Asia and the United States.

The artist now lives and works in Carpi.

Copyright the artist. Photo Olivo Barbieri