Paolo Gasparini, whose work is central to our exhibition ‘Urban Forms’, was born in 1934 in Gorizia, Italy and lives in Caracas, Venezuela.
He studied photography in Italy under Aldo Mazucco. In 1954 he settled in Venezuela, beginning to work out of his own studio, Arquifoto, and contributing to the magazine A, Hombre y Expresión.
In 1958 the MoMA acquired some of his photographs and the following year he participated in the exhibition “Photography at Mid-Century” of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House.
From 1961 to 1965 he lived in Cuba, where he collaborated with Alejo Carpentier at the journal Revolución. There, along with the cause of the revolution, he adopted the 35mm camera format.
In 1967, following two years in Italy, he returned to Venezuela and began working on a cycle of photographs of architecture all over Latin America, commissioned by the UNESCO.
In 1995 he was a member of the Venezuelan delegation to the Venice Biennial, exhibiting his photomurals El cuerpo del Che, El cuerpo de Tina, and El rostro barrido. At the same
time he was working on his photographic and audiovisual series Megalópolis.
Paolo Gasparini has published numerous books, including La ciudad de las
columnas (Havana, 1970), with a text by his friend Alejo Carpentier, the
virtuosic “Retromundo” (Caracas, 1986), brilliantly laid out by Álvaro Sotillo, and “Del reverso de las imágenes” (Mexico City, 2015), published by the Galería López Quiroga on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name.
Paolo Gasparini’s work can be found in numerous institutional and private collections in Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, France, Spain, the United States, and elsewhere.