Gabriele Basilico Biography
Dalmazio Gabriele Basilico (Milan, 12 August 1944 – Milan, 13 February 2013) was an Italian photographer. He made his debut at the end of the sixties with photographs of social investigation. After graduating in architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan (1973), he dedicated himself to photography continuously. His first important research dates back to the years 1978-1980 - Milan. Portraits of factories - presented in 1983 at the PAC (Milan Contemporary Art Pavilion). His first international assignment dates back to 1984, when he was invited to participate, as the only Italian, in the Mission Photographique de la DATAR, the important project to document the transformations of the contemporary landscape wanted by the French government. From this work the book and the exhibition Bord de mer were born. After a few years, in 1990, he received the “Prix Mois de la Photo” in Paris for the exhibition and book Porti di Mare. In 1991, with an important project on the city of Beirut, devastated by a civil war that lasted fifteen years, his notoriety moved to an even more decidedly international level. An initial assessment of his work is the subject of the retrospective at the Fondazione Galleria Gottardo in Lugano in 1994 and of the volume L'experience dei places. Photographs 1978-1993. Invited to the 1996 Venice Biennale with the exhibition Sections of Italian Landscape/Italy. Cross Sections of a Country, in collaboration with Stefano Boeri, receives the “Osella d'oro” award for contemporary architectural photography[5]. In 1999 he published Interrupted City and Cityscapes, with over three hundred images of cities taken since the mid-1980s, from which he selected a series of photographs for exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, at the CPF (Centro Portugues de Fotografia) in Porto, at the MART (Museum of Modern Art of Trento and Rovereto) in Trento, and at the MAMBA (Museo de Arte Moderno) in Buenos Aires. In 2000 he carried out a work on the metropolitan area of Berlin at the invitation of the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst) and exhibited Milan, Berlin, Valencia at the IVAM (Istituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno) in Valencia. He also receives the "INU" award (National Institute of Urban Planning) for his contribution to the documentation of contemporary urban space. In 2002, the GAM, the Galleria civica d'arte moderni e contemporain of Turin dedicated a retrospective to him, and as part of Photo España, with the volume Berlin he won the prize for the best photographic book of the year. In 2003 he participated in the V Biennial of Architecture and Design of Sao Paulo with an exhibition in collaboration with Alvaro Siza, subsequently exhibited at the Triennale in Milan and at the PAN in Naples.
