Castle, Parliament Hall and adjoining rooms of the Old Art Gallery (11, 12 and 13)
5 April – 4 November, 2025
Exhibition organised by the Civic Museums of Udine edited by Silvia Bianco, Alessandra Mauro, Roberto Koch in collaboration with Angela Salomone Iodice, Barbara Iodice, Suleima Autore
The Civic Museums of Udine, continuing their reflection on the value of photography as a work of art and, operating on the work and archives of great Italian photographers, present, for the first time in the region, an anthological exhibition in the spaces of the Castle paying tribute to the famous Neapolitan photographer Mimmo Jodice, former winner, in 1992 of the FVG Photography Prize awarded by CRAF.
Born in Naples in 1934, Mimmo Jodice approached photography for its ability to create visions. His complex and long path goes through Italian photography and art in their different phases: from the conceptual experiments of the 1960s to a photography that stares head on the heart of social plagues; from a redefinition of the Italian landscape, in the season of collective works around the possibility of still looking at the ‘Bel Paese’, to the more subtle and accurate research on the places and heritage of our past. A particular, varied and always consistent artistic path that Jodice himself, in the book La camera incantata, described through some key words that represent him: language, people, silence, enigma, perspectives and reverberations.
The exhibition presents 140 photographs made between 1964 and 2015, including several of the most iconic works that definitively attested to the greatness of the Neapolitan master, black-and-white works in different formats and in various compositions in a new path and selection designed for the Museum of Udine.
The exhibition grew out of the collaboration with the famous photographer by proposing a sequence of unpublished images thanks to an exhibition path designed to retrace the Neapolitan master's creative, researched and innovative activity and process, emphasising the peculiarities and features in a thematic sequence that takes up the main themes of his works: languages, attention to social issues and traditions, silence, relationship with the works of the past, visions of nature and cities that go beyond national geographical limits in a global artistic vision.
Jodice’s work is a refined and intimate process, enriched by his personal memories, his experience in a city as rich and complex as Naples, made up of places, people and memories, his ability to show us reality observed through the filter of a different and suspended time. The exhibition, starting from the study of the artistic and creative path, proposes a synthesis of the Neapolitan master's production, retracing and dwelling on the main inspirational themes of his art, following the thread linking the projects and narrates his poetics.
Languages, Cities, from Naples-his Naples-through Trieste and opening to the cities of the world, the relationship with History and the Past, Nature and Seas.
The exhibition Mimmo Jodice. L’enigma della Luce (Mimmo Jodice. The Enigma of Light) proposes a new, complete and accurate path to illustrate the artist's work. The curators proposed the exhibition of complete projects in order to involve the public more and give even the youngest audience the chance to understand its language and content.
Among the photographs devoted to cities, a cluster of photographs made in Trieste in 1985 is presented; the section dedicated to Nature includes the entire Eden project, made in 1995, consisting of 44 photographs in which Jodice revisits the classic theme of still life by photographing unusual compositions as a metaphor for everyday violence, the persuasive and pervasive violence with which induced and ephemeral needs seduce us.
Visitors cross the gazes of past statues in the works Anamnesi and I volti della memoria.
The visit to the exhibition ends in the silence of Jodice's seas and with an excerpt from the documentary made by Mario Martone in which Mimmo Jodice tells his story.
