11/1/2023 0 Comments Eisenstein piranesi prisonThe exhibition comprises the complete sets of the first and second edition of Piranesi’s Carceri from the National Gallery of Victoria collection, and Vik Muniz’s series of eight photographs after Piranesi’s Prisons on loan from Sikkema Jenkins Gallery, New York. Its roots are in a labyrinthine short story by Borges and the fantastical prison etchings of the 18th-century artist who gives the book its name, but also in the collective subconscious of dreams. His large photographs invite the viewer to look anew at Piranesi’s iconic images, and simultaneously, to explore Muniz’s artful constructions. A photograph of these constructions is the end product of Muniz’s work. In his Prisons, after Piranesi series Muniz replicates the etched lines of the Prison images with thread, which is wound around hundreds of pins on a cardboard surface. Muniz works between drawing and photography, recreating iconic images from the work of past masters including Rembrandt, Goya and Piranesi in a range of unusual but significant media, such as chocolate, sugar, dust, wire and string. This exhibition brings together the first and second edition of Piranesi’s Prison series with eight photographs made in 2002 by the Brazilian-born, New York based artist Vik Muniz. Returning to the series a decade later Piranesi substantially reworked the images, transforming the loose, lightly etched prints of the first edition into darker images full of shadows, torture instruments and prisoners. Piranesi’s innovative approach to the medium of etching is matched by his formal investigations into the representation of pictorial space, resulting in compositions that revel in ambiguity. As the title of the series suggests, the prints represent views of imaginary prisons, depicted as vast yet claustrophobic environments populated by tiny figures. While it is hard to find meaning in the first state of the series, the second state includes explicit references to the justice system under the Roman Republic and to the cruelty for which certain emperors were known.The breathtaking originality of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s dramatic series of etchings, the Imaginary Prisons (Carceri d’invenzione), has remained a source of inspiration and fascination for artists, writers and architects since they were first published in Rome in the mid-eighteenth century. ![]() leaps out of the vertical format-into the horizontal. 4 Diagram by Eisenstein of Piranesi's Carcere Oscura. Those extraordinary prints are the subject of this article. And both experiments were presented here in 'historical' 3 Giovanni Batista Piranesi, Carcere Oscura ('The Dark Prison'), ca.1745. The reworked plates are even darker and more complex, with added details and inscriptions. In the first article about the art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (17201778), to celebrate today, the three-hundredth anniversay of his birth, I looked at his career and works, except for his series of etchings of Imaginary Prisons which he made between about 1745-50. It is thought to have been created under the influence of the etching 'Prison madis' of Daniel Marot. About ten years later, Piranesi reworked these plates and added two new images to the series. Book chapter in: ASPECTS OF PIRANESI: ESSAYS ON HISTORY, CRITICISM, AND INVENTION, edited by Dirk De Meyer, Bart Verschaffel, and Pieter-Jan Cierkens (Ghent: A&S Books, 2015), pp. It is part of the series Opere varie di Arehitettura, And it is called Careere oseura ('The Dark Prison,' fig. ![]() Spatial anomalies and ambiguities abound in all the images of the series they were not meant to be logical but to express the vastness and strength that Piranesi experienced in contemplating Roman architecture. Actual prisons in the Italy were tiny dungeons. The fourteen plates depicting prisons - probably Piranesi's best-known series - were described on their title page as ‘capricious inventions.’ These structures, their immensity emphasized by the low viewpoint and the diminutive figures, derive from stage prisons rather than real ones. Piranesi studied architecture, engineering and stage design, and his first plans for buildings reflect his training combined with the tremendous impact of classical Roman architecture. Piranesi was an extraordinarily talented artist who came to be considered the best known engraver and etcher of the 18th century. Rome was the inspiration for and subject of most of his etchings that number over a thousand. ![]() A native of Venice, Piranesi went to Rome at age twenty and where he remained for the remainder of his life.
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