Ugo Mulas was born on 28 August 1928 in Pozzolengo, near Desenzano del Garda (Brescia), where his father had moved from Sardinia. He completed his studies and classical high school diploma in Desenzano. In 1948-52 in Milan, he enrolled in law studies, but abandoned them before graduating to take courses at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. He frequents the Jamaica bar, a meeting place for artists and intellectuals. He begins to take an interest in photography. Between 1954-58 he began his professional activity as a photographer at the Venice Biennale. In this period he photographed the bidonvilles, the station and the suburbs of Milan. He earns his living by taking advertising, fashion and reportage photographs for various magazines and newspapers, but his main interest is in the world of art. He photographed the Venice Biennale until 1972, capturing its most important events. He began his collaboration with Giorgio Strehler of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. In 1960 he carried out numerous reportages in Europe for Illustrazione Italiana with Giorgio Zampa, for Settimo Giorno, for Rivista Pirelli, for Novità (Vogue), Domus, Du. He collaborates with the advertising offices of Pirelli and Olivetti. From 1962-64 are the photographs of the outdoor sculpture exhibition in Spoleto (1962) of David Smith in his atelier in Voltri (1962), of Alexander Calder in Spoleto and in Saché in Touraine in 1962, and in 1964 in his atelier in Roxbury in Massachusetts, the photographs for the poems of Eugenio Montale Ossi di Seppia. In these years he met Alan Solomon, Leo Castelli, and numerous American artists at the 1964 Biennial. He traveled to New York in 1964, 1965 and 1967, years in which he created an exceptional documentation of the New York art scene. The collaboration between Giorgio Strehler and Ugo Mulas began a model of theater photography according to the Brechtian principles of estrangement. The staging of The Life of Galileo in 1964 is testimony to this. In 1969 he took a series of photographs for the sets of Benjamin Britten’s opera The turn of the screw, based on the novel by Henry James, directed by Puecher at the Piccola Scala in Milan (1969) and for opera by Alban Berg Woyzeck, from the drama by Georg Büchner, directed by Puecher, at the Teatro Comunale of Bologna.
Between 1970-72 he fell seriously ill. The series of photographs The verifications begins: twelve photographs, each accompanied by a text in which he retraces his being a photographer and his profession as a man. He died in Milan on 2 March 1973.
Ugo Mulas is not only the photographic witness of Milan, artistic but not only, of the 50s and 60s, of the Venice Biennale of the same years, of American art experienced firsthand of the developments of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art , the friend of Calder and many artists. He is also and above all a protagonist of those years, the one who changed photography, not only in Italy. His famous ones Checks , the last series created before death took him prematurely, is not only the final outcome of his research and the definition with which it is classified as conceptual photography is not enough to exhaust its meaning. Mulas is a photographer who has had his eye on the analysis of the photographic medium since the beginning, who scrutinizes, while portraying, the conditions of artists’ creativity, who changes the conventional methods of the photographic genres to which he dedicates himself, from portrait to photography of theatre, from fashion to scenography; he is a careful researcher who immediately understands that art is changing and immediately leaves to go where, in New York, he understands that what interests him is happening; he is the art reporter who understands the importance of process in artistic creation, both others and one’s own; he is the photographer who makes the leap into art, who makes it possible for Italian photography and beyond. Mulas is the most influential photographer of Italian art. His work deserves a revisitation that shows these aspects: verification of checks, verification of his work in the light of his own Checks, a coherent path like few others, which was among the first to open Italian art to conceptuality, immediately showing how awareness of the medium is indispensable to art as much as art is to awareness of the medium, that the concept does not exist without creation and research without sensitivity.
The exhibition will offer a selection of around 110 photographs, not without unpublished and little-known images, reconstructing Mulas’s artistic career in its entirety, focused on sequences and contacts, showing Mulas’s personal artistic reflection.
We will insist on the figure of Mulas as an artist (not as a documentary photographer), and the chronological path will be in reverse: from the Verifications (12) to his work on the scenography (10 from Wozzeck and 10 from The Turn of the Screw), to the sequences (6 Cuttlefish Bones, 10 Duchamp, 6 Fontana + a sequence on Giacometti), to then move on to the work on art (the artists) (3 large complete specimens: Johns, Lichtenstein, Noland, 25 portraits + 1 Urban field) and return to the one on Milan (15 Milan of the 50s, 5 Milan of the 60s + 3 colour), but not in a documentary sense, but rather as personal research, and for this reason, in this last section the images will be mixed from a chronological point of view , precisely to show the continuity of the artist’s project.
Edited by Elio Grazioli, contemporary art critic
