The ICA Milano Foundation exhibits for the very first time three works from the series 52 Ludlow created by Giovanni Stefano Ghidini (Urago d’Oglio 1957), part of a broad project developed by the artist over twenty-five years. This core of works reflects the essence of a research that intertwines nature, sculpture, and photography.

Starting in 1997, on the roof of a building at 52 Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side of New York, Ghidini cultivated sunflowers grown up to two meters in height, transforming them into monumental and anthropomorphic presences through a ritual of care, waiting, and transformation. Year after year, the artist built a vast archive of negatives, engaging with ideas of renewal, ritual, compassion, acceptance, and beauty — elements that also define his way of life. The flowers become a metaphor for existence, its cyclical nature and impermanence, shaping the entire project into a true Gesamtkunstwerk: a total work of art composed with meticulousness and silence.

In 2022, Ghidini began creating platinum prints in collaboration with a master printer. The richly nuanced textures and the unique luminosity of this technique enhance the psychological depth of the images, revealing a silent and enduring beauty. While sunflowers may seem simple to our eyes, their florets tell the complexity of life: from a dense center, the flowers spiral out with long petals forming a protective crown.

The refined and deeply original work of the artist speaks of the temporality and impermanence of existence, while also showing the persistence of beauty. Gianni Ghidini is a photographer whose work, for decades, has been silent and private: a personal engagement with himself and his own idea of photography, not as a representation of reality, but as a personal, necessary, and vital language.

52 Ludlow roots itself in a pre-existing unconscious inner dimension before the artist's arrival in New York, as it is a latent image that found its inscription surface in the Chinatown wall. The sunflowers — cultivated, tamed, contained in custom-made vases resembling clothing — appear as bodies, relational presences expressing an intense and irreducible bond beyond words.