Guido Guidi. Around here. Photographic Projects for the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, 1985-2014
Castle, Rooms 11-13 of the Galleria d’Arte Antica, Piazzale Patria del Friuli 1 - Udine
13 December 2025 - 6 April 2026
Tuesday to Sunday (closed Mondays, 25 December and 1 January)
Inauguration Friday 12 December 2025 6 p.m.
Opening Saturday 13 December 2025 at 1 p.m.
Exhibition organised by the Public Museums of Udine and the Centro di Ricerca e Archiviazione della Fotografia - CRAF (Photographic Research Centre and Archive), curated by Silvia Bianco, Antonello Frongia and Andrea Pertoldeo.
The Public Museums of Udine, in parallel with the retrospective Guido Guidi. With time, 1956-2024, realised by the MAXXI Museum in Rome and inaugurated on 27 September 2025 at the Udine Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art - Casa Cavazzini, presents the exhibition Around here. Photography Projects for the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, 1985-2014, an itinerary of 140 images taken by the Cesena-born photographer in Friuli Venezia Giulia over a thirty-year period.
Guido Guidi (Cesena, 1941) is today recognised as one of the major protagonists of international photography. Since the 1960s, Guidi has defined his research as a reflection on seeing, on time and on photography itself: a meditation - as he has repeatedly noted - conducted through the exploration of ‘ordinary’ places, in the ‘cracks’ that open up between the things, signs and images of the vernacular landscape, in the uncertain ‘margins’ that separate and unite everything our eyes know, or think they know. Searching for physically and mentally ‘out-of-place’ viewpoints and continuously renewing his visual language, over the course of 60 years Guidi has built an unprecedented and complex iconography of the contemporary landscape, recognised as a palimpsest of signs and stories, a sedimentation of practices and projects, a projection of high and low cultures, but also an active and enigmatic subject that ideally returns our gaze to question our capacity for care and understanding.
Realised in collaboration with the Archivio Guidi in Cesena, the exhibition brings together the research carried out by the photographer as part of projects and educational workshops commissioned by organisations and institutions in the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region (CRAF, ATER, University of Trieste, ACMA) in Trieste (1985 and 2002), Spilimbergo (1991, 1994, 1995 and 1997), Venzone (1996), Lestans (1992 and 1998), Pielungo, Pinzano and Udine (1999), Gorizia (2004), San Vito al Tagliamento and Lignano Sabbiadoro (2014).
The exhibition, which is part of CRAF’s Contemporary Photography 2025 programme curated by Andrea Pertoldeo and realised with the support of the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, is sponsored by ATER, the Pordenone-Udine Chamber of Commerce, Confindustria Udine, Fondazione Friuli, the Order of Architects of the Province of Udine, the University of Trieste and the University of Udine.
The exhibition is accompanied by the publication In Friuli Venezia Giulia, on sale in the bookshops of the Public Museums of Udine: a project by Guido Guidi with a special reinterpretation of his photos taken in Friuli Venezia Giulia.
BIOGRAPHY
After graduating from Ravenna Art School in 1959, in the second half of the 1960s Guidi was a student of Italo Zannier at the Advanced Course in Industrial Design and at the University Institute of Architecture in Venice. Active in photographic research since 1969, he has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. A long-time lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna and the Faculty of Design and Arts at the Iuav University of Venice, he has twice won (in 2014 and 2020) the Hemingway Prize in Lignano Sabbiadoro. His first retrospective volume, Varianti, was published in 1995 by Arti Grafiche Friulane, in collaboration with CRAF in Spilimbergo. Since 2013, he has been working with the publisher Mack in London, where he has published nine volumes to date.
His works are held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Centre for Studies and Archives of Communication at the University of Parma, the Fondation A Stichting, Fondazione Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Fondazione Sandretto-Rebaudengo, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Linea di Confine for Contemporary Photography, MAXXI (National Museum of 21st Century Arts), Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea di Cinisello Balsamo, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg.
Guidi is represented by the galleries Viasaterna in Milan and Large Glass in London.
Cover image: Spilimbergo, 1994 © Guido Guidi