Rediscovering Luigi Ghirri, one of Italy’s great photographers, through an exhibition curated by Luca Guadagnino

From January 23 to May 9, 2026, the two London spaces of the Thomas Dane Gallery present "Felicità", a new exhibition dedicated to Luigi Ghirri that promises to reopen the conversation around one of the most influential photographers of the second half of the twentieth century, with a surprisingly timely focus on the core of his practice. Curated by filmmaker Luca Guadagnino and artist Alessio Bolzoni, the exhibition engages with an unfamiliar Ghirri: not only a photographer, but an artist deeply aware of the compositional mechanisms of the image, employed with a conceptual clarity that bears distinctly contemporary traits.

Much has already been said and written about Ghirri’s life and work, yet in "Felicità", alongside a rich and layered visual language that still resonates today through its foresight, another narrative emerges—one that is discreet yet distinctive of his photographic approach. The exhibition unveils an archive of images never previously exhibited or published, from which a grounded yet anticipatory Ghirri comes into focus, capable of unsettling the banality with which images pass before our eyes.

At 3 Duke Street, the exhibition opens with a selection of works reflecting on visual consumption and the circulation of images: fragments of postcards, newspaper pages, torn posters, street signs that always point beyond the frame. A composite imagery of surfaces and representations subtly dialogues with Jorge Luis Borges, and with his idea of the world as an infinite library — a map built on references and duplications.

In the second venue, at number 11, attention shifts to interiors and exteriors, to walls that become pages and rooms that flatten into screens, where “every surface is like a mirror of the medium,” writes curator and writer Tosia Leniarska. In this section, Ghirri’s work enters into dialogue with that of other artists of his time, from Giorgio Morandi to Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, represented by two works from 1988 and 1992 that transform landscape photography into an intimate and fragile gesture.

The itinerary closes with a selection from the series Paesaggio Italiano - with a selection from the Paesaggio Italiano series—the same Emilian landscape Ghirri made iconic in the 1980s—yet here too the curatorial choice avoids the most familiar images, favouring those in which framing becomes a reflection device, creating screens and rectangles of vision whose vanishing perspective lines converge in the viewer's gaze, and where ambiguity combines with precision in seemingly instinctive shots.

Tosia Leniarska

Exhibition: "Felicità" Curated by: Luca Guadagnino and Alessio Bolzoni Location: Thomas Dane Gallery, London, UK Dates: January 23, 2026 - May 9, 2026