Exhibitions archive

Moon photography exhibition “Luca Missoni: The Moon Journey”

7 June – 9 July 2023

Starting from the film A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès realized in 1902, to 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, produced in 1968, the popular image of the Moon was radically transformed. In the 19th Century, when the bright disk on a clear night evoked a feeling of nostalgia for the infinite compared to the limitation and caducity of human life, the arid surface of the Moon with its craters that science offered to our view in the last decades was interpreted as a blank surface on which human beings could imagine a new life for future generations.

Luca Missoni is part of that generation, and he lived through this transformation of the Moon myth, of which he is a witness through his work as a photographer. Since childhood, he has looked at the Moon with a telescope, focusing on this renewed view.

The exhibition at the National Library presents two series of photographs dedicated to the artist’s observation of the Moon. The first series of fifteen images is in natural color and reveals a scientific view of the Moon’s phases during its status change. This series is the core of Luca Missoni’s production, which he realized over years of watching the Moon with a telescope from the rooftop of his house. In the second one, he uses the color filter to imagine a different representation of the Moon, starting a trip around an imaginary of the Moon on which he has worked in the last few years. The composition of colored Moons is the more recent part of his production, with many variants and site-specific installations. A series of colored moons was designed by the artist to create an imaginary moon system.

Specifically for the National Library of Lithuania, he realized a short video to be shown on a big screen inside the exhibition space. The Moon, in a sequence of natural and colored surfaces, moves through the sidereal space at intervals of time, which reminds us of his observation with the telescope and makes clear the artist’s contemplative act of representing the Moon as an obsessive act.

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Exhibition curator Maurizio Bortolotti.