L'oro del tempo

Mario Cresci
Since the sixties Mario Cresci has created a complex selection of works characterised by a freedom of research ranging from drawing, photography, video, installation and site specific interventions. He is one of the first artists of his generation to apply the culture of the project by combining it with experimentation on visual languages. In the Seventies he came into contact with Filiberto Menna and Albe Steiner; the latter invited him to the Venice Biennale in 1970 with a series of drawings completed in Basilicata on the organic thought of the material culture of the rural world in relation to the design culture acquired at the High Course of industrial design in Venetian (1962-64). The re-establishment of the sense of landscape and construction of the photographic image made him one of the key artists in the Viaggio in Italia project that Luigi Ghirri organized and exhibits at the Pinacoteca Provinciale in Bari in 1984. Between 1991 and 1999, as director of the Accademia di Belle Arti G. Carrara in Bergamo, he included numerous cultural events devoted to young artists in his innovative interdisciplinary programming, such as Arte&Impresa, Clorofilla and Accademie in Europa, in collaboration with GAMeC in Bergamo. In 2017 the exhibition La Fotografia del No. 1964-2016 at the GAMeC in Bergamo, where he exhibits fifty years of work addressing the pathway to reading some of the major themes shared by most of his projects. His production of books and more generally of contributions, also theoretical, on photography and visual communication is wide and articulated. He publishes the book Segni migranti. Storia di grafica e fotografia (Postcart Editions), a compendium of his graphic and photographic research, winner of the Prix du Livre Historique, at Les Rencontres de la Photographie 2020 of Arles. He teaches at the ISIA University in Urbino and at Foundation FMAV in Modena. He lives and works in Bergamo.