Gabriele Basilico was born in 1944 in Milan. By training, he is an architect who, in the 1970s, was passionately and forever interested in photography. Among his first "models" were the industrial enterprises of Milan, and since then Basilico has managed to explore hundreds of different typologies and spaces with the help of a photographic lens. Basilico has participated in over 100 group exhibitions and has hosted about 50 solo exhibitions, including a major retrospective show at the Turin Art Gallery of Contemporary Art in 2002. In Moscow, which captivated the photographer from the first shot, he made a series of city panoramas from the height of seven Stalinist skyscrapers. The photographs of Basilico presented in the Museum of Architecture are an attempt to look at the Russian capital as a set of verticals, to trace how the urban environment changes in different weather and under different lighting conditions and the accents of the existing architectural ensembles sound.
Moscow attracted Gabriele Basilico with the pace and scale of the transformations that it has been going through over the past 15 years and which have directly affected the architecture of the city. Architectural monuments of different eras and new buildings, claiming to be ultramodern, coexist here (not always peacefully), but the world practically does not know what is happening in the Moscow “laboratory”, and it is this gap that the Italian photographer undertook to eliminate.
The Vertical Moscow project is an attempt at documentary research of the metamorphosis of the urban landscape. Basilico takes pictures from the peaks of the Seven Sisters, the famous Moscow skyscrapers built during the Stalin era. They were not chosen by chance: the photographer strove to capture the image of the post-Soviet metropolis from the height of the most representative monuments of the era of socialism. Thus, for the new portrait of Moscow, the “vertical” dimension becomes the leading one, as opposed to the traditional horizontal vision.
From a height, the changes that have taken place in the urban landscape surrounding the "skyscrapers" are particularly striking. The original urban planning concept has already been partially erased by the wave of time: the imperious axes of the Stalinist general plan are lost in endless traffic jams and dissolve in the monotonous geometry of sleeping microdistricts. Panoramas and the current situation with the high-rise dominants of the city show very eloquently: whole ridges of new peaks have appeared in its landscape, but not everyone succeeded in entering into a full dialogue with the stone masses of the "socialist towers".
The exposition is divided into mini-sections, each of which is dedicated to a separate "skyscraper" - the hotel "Ukraine", Moscow State University, the administrative building on the Red Gate and others. Such a geographical principle, of course, greatly facilitates the life of visitors, helping to navigate city panoramas and, mentally ascending to a particular skyscraper, thoughtfully follow the photographer's gaze. A separate stand is occupied by large "personal portraits" of the skyscrapers themselves. And if the modern city with its traffic jams and construction sites is represented by Basilico in all the variegation characteristic of the metropolis, then the "seven sisters" themselves are photographed on black and white film. The majestic shots seem to send the viewer back to the past, make one recall the famous photographs of Stalinist architecture of the 50s and 60s (works by Naum Granovsky and others). And, perhaps, the combination of semi-antique photographs and photographs of modern Moscow most clearly demonstrates the difference in the perception of the city, makes one think about the changes that have taken place in the metropolis over the past fifty years.
The exhibition of works by Gabriele Basilico will run until February 5, 2012.
