Mario Cresci: People I Care About
10 Oct — 19 Dec 2026Large Glass is delighted to present People I Care About, Italian artist Mario Cresci's second solo exhibition at the gallery.
The exhibition focuses on a series of images made in Tricarico, a town and comune in the province of Matera, Italy, between 1966 and 1967. At the time sociologists and intellectuals were drawn to this Southern Italian region, inspired by the writings of Carlo Levi and the anthropological research of Ernesto De Martino. These portraits are part of a significant body of work that documents this area and its people and Cresci's own relationships to them.
"Like the traces left by a contemporary migrant, the works in this exhibition are signs of a human encounter with multiple geographies and media. The camera for Mario Cresci is equivalent to a brush, a felt pen, and a charcoal, in its continuous writing and rewriting of an experience, in the reframing of an action, the recuperation of an absence, and the imaginative games with memory," writes Antonella Pelizzari in her accompanying text.
Running alongside Cresci’s London exhibition, 'People I Care About', Matèria gallery in Rome will present 'I Luoghi del Possibile' from 3 October to 5 December.
Mario Cresci was born in Chiavari, Italy in 1942 and now lives and works in Bergamo. He attended the School of Industrial Design in Venice and currently teaches at the ISIA University in Urbino.
Cresci’s work has been exhibited at major museums and institutions, including MAXXI (Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo) in Rome, GAM (Galleria d'Arte Moderna) and CAMERA (Centro Italiano per la Fotografia) in Turin, and GAMeC (Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) in Bergamo. His work was included in the recent REVERSING THE EYE: Arte Povera and Beyond 1960–75 Photography, Film, Video exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
Major publications include Matera: Images and Documents (1975), Measurements. Photography and Territory (1979), and Segni Migranti. Storia di grafica e fotografia (2019), which won the Prix du Livre Historique at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2020.
Antonella Pelizzari is a professor of the history of photography at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). A specialist in Italian visual culture, she has written extensively on art and photography. Her latest anthology is titled Print Matters: Media and Modernity in Illustrated Magazines, 1910–1970. Pelizzari was a photography curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where she organised the exhibition Traces of India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation, which won the CAA British Art Historians Prize.
The exhibition focuses on a series of images made in Tricarico, a town and comune in the province of Matera, Italy, between 1966 and 1967. At the time sociologists and intellectuals were drawn to this Southern Italian region, inspired by the writings of Carlo Levi and the anthropological research of Ernesto De Martino. These portraits are part of a significant body of work that documents this area and its people and Cresci's own relationships to them.
"Like the traces left by a contemporary migrant, the works in this exhibition are signs of a human encounter with multiple geographies and media. The camera for Mario Cresci is equivalent to a brush, a felt pen, and a charcoal, in its continuous writing and rewriting of an experience, in the reframing of an action, the recuperation of an absence, and the imaginative games with memory," writes Antonella Pelizzari in her accompanying text.
Running alongside Cresci’s London exhibition, 'People I Care About', Matèria gallery in Rome will present 'I Luoghi del Possibile' from 3 October to 5 December.
Mario Cresci was born in Chiavari, Italy in 1942 and now lives and works in Bergamo. He attended the School of Industrial Design in Venice and currently teaches at the ISIA University in Urbino.
Cresci’s work has been exhibited at major museums and institutions, including MAXXI (Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo) in Rome, GAM (Galleria d'Arte Moderna) and CAMERA (Centro Italiano per la Fotografia) in Turin, and GAMeC (Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) in Bergamo. His work was included in the recent REVERSING THE EYE: Arte Povera and Beyond 1960–75 Photography, Film, Video exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
Major publications include Matera: Images and Documents (1975), Measurements. Photography and Territory (1979), and Segni Migranti. Storia di grafica e fotografia (2019), which won the Prix du Livre Historique at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2020.
Antonella Pelizzari is a professor of the history of photography at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). A specialist in Italian visual culture, she has written extensively on art and photography. Her latest anthology is titled Print Matters: Media and Modernity in Illustrated Magazines, 1910–1970. Pelizzari was a photography curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where she organised the exhibition Traces of India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation, which won the CAA British Art Historians Prize.