On Wednesday 29 March 2023, the new exhibition and research centre, " Le Stanze della Fotografia ", will open to the public within the Giorgio Cini Foundation , in the Sale del Convitto, on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, with a large complete retrospective dedicated to Ugo Mulas, which presents for the first time an important selection of vintage images never exhibited before, and the exhibition "Venice alter mundus" with photographs by Alessandra Chemollo.

"Le Stanze della Fotografia" is the joint initiative of Marsilio Arte and the Giorgio Cini Foundation, destined to continue the path begun in 2012 at the Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice - a historic neo-Gothic building located on the Giudecca island and recently purchased by Berggruen Institute – in the belief that photography, one of the most interesting artistic languages of the modern and contemporary, must continue to have its own specific "home" in Venice. Alongside the exhibition activities, a dedicated Foundation will support research projects thanks to the contribution of the strategic partners Fondazione di Venezia and San Marco Group.

The Ugo Mulas exhibition. The photographic operation , which will be presented on the occasion of the inauguration of the new center and will be open to visitors from 29 March to 6 August 2023, was created in collaboration with the Mulas Archive and curated by Denis Curti and Alberto Salvadori, director of the Archive. The project coincides with the 50th anniversary of the author's death on March 2, 1973.

More than 300 images, including 30 photos never exhibited before, documents, books, publications, films, offer a synthesis capable of restoring a reading that opens up to the different experiences faced by Ugo Mulas (Pozzolengo, 1928 - Milan, 1973), a photographer transversal to all pre-established genres and capable of investigating different themes, always seeking the depth of the "human quantity".

One of the most important figures in international photography after the Second World War, Mulas soon understood, as a self-taught photographer, that being a photographer meant providing a critical testimony of society, and it was precisely this awareness that guided his first reportages between 1953 and 1954: the suburbs of Milan and the artistic and cultural environment of the famous Bar Jamaica in the early 1950s. Mulas quickly established himself in the most diverse fields of photography, from fashion to advertising, publishing in numerous magazines such as "Settimo Giorno", "Rivista Pirelli", "Domus", "Vogue". In these years the photographer develops an important artistic collaboration with Giorgio Strehler, thanks to whom he will publish the photo chronicles "The Threepenny Opera" (1961) and "Schweyck in the Second World War" (1962).

“Ugo Mulas. Photo title © Heirs Ugo Mulas. All rights reserved. Courtesy Ugo Mulas Archive, Milan – Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan / Naples”