Robilant + Voena are pleased to present the first solo exhibition of the Italian photographer Ugo Mulas (1928-1973) in London and the UK. The show will highlight the creative links between his “critical reportage” and Italian post-war artists in the 1960s and early 1970s. His incredible images, some of which never revealed before, will be exhibited in connection with rare and important artworks from his own private collection. Shown together for the first time, they offer an intimate and unique point of view on these creative relationships.

Curated by Francesca Pola and realized in collaboration with the Archivio Ugo Mulas, the exhibition focuses on Mulas’ unprecedented vision of photography as a critical operation of knowledge and understanding of modern and contemporary art. In his connection with Italian post-war artists, Mulas realizes the need to understand and bear witness to emerging practices; those which move beyond tradition towards new ideas of space, matter, object and environment. The exhibition in London features this connection by presenting artworks by Lucio Fontana, Pietro Consagra, Fausto Melotti, and Michelangelo Pistoletto from Mulas’ private collection, together with his own photographic works.

Mulas conceives his notion of “critical reportage” by relating his eye to each of the artists in a specific way, sometimes in a cinematic key, giving birth to dynamic creative intersections between visual art and photography. The artworks provide a field of experimentation for a new photographic vision and the photographic practice, in turn, becomes a live repository for expression. The result is a breath-taking display of the interweaving of disciplines, personalities, spaces, and experiences that characterize the effervescent cultural context of an extraordinary moment in Italian 20th Century creativity, through the privileged eye of one of its greatest interpreters, Ugo Mulas.

The project is developed in continuity with the activity of Robilant+Voena, aimed at championing ground-breaking and distinctive artists and movements in Italian art of the 20th Century, presenting the uniqueness of Mulas’s vision in his relationship to this context.