Linda Fregni Nagler

“In her approach to photography, Linda Fregni Nagler is at the same time artist in the traditional sense of the word as well as collector and scholar. She restages, re-photographs or simply displays the photographs she has gathered over the years, mainly anonymous pictures from the 19th and the first half of the 20th Century, to investigate their tradition, their cultural and anthropological conventions and iconographic models, allowing us to see them in an unexpected light through her strategies of presentation.” (Simone Menegoi)

News from Wonderland narrates a labyrinth of mirrors that deform, distort and fragment photographs from 20th century US periodicals, showcasing the relationship between humans and animals.

Interested in the constituent factors of the photographic process – light, time, optical devices – Linda Fregni Nagler has used concave or fragmented mirrors to re-photograph images as they are subjected to a process of alteration of forms and composition. Reflected in this deforming device, the original photograph loses the spatial references that dictate the framing, distorting one portion while duplicating another, or completely concealing yet another. The eye and the lens do not see in the same way. Hence, the process of construction of this exhibition has been for the artist a way of questioning the true ability of the camera to capture what the human eye is able to see. The choice of the vantage point is painstaking; a few millimeters macroscopically alter the distortion and therefore the perception of the new image created through the reflection. Like the clues of a riddle to be solved, in the exhibition different versions of the same original photograph cross paths, leaving the observer with the desire to identify kindred images. While we try to put a sequence together, our ability to entirely comprehend the original image remains limited.

Unlike what happens in an amusement park, where the “mirror maze” playfully distorts and reshapes our reflected image, leaving us in the tranquillity of having passed through an illusion, these photographs capture precisely that illusion, making us enter a surreal world that alters our perception and comprehension of what we are seeing.

Linda Fregni Nagler (1976, Stockholm) has shown her work in many solo and group exhibitions, including the 55th Venice Biennale, as well as prestigious museums in Italy, where she currently lives (MAXXI Rome, Fondazione Olivetti Rome, Triennale Milano, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo) and abroad (Moderna Museet Stockholm, Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Columbia University NY, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe).

Her solo exhibition “Linda Fregni Nagler. Fotografie neu ordnen: Blickinszenierungen” is currently in progress at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg (until 7.1.2024). In 2007 she received the New York Prize of the Foreign Office and Columbia University. In 2014 she had a residency at IASPIS (Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Program for Visual Artists) in Stockholm, and in 2016 she won the Premio ACACIA.

Monographs on her work have been published by Mack Books (London): “The Hidden Mother” and Humboldt Books (Milan): “Hercule Florence. Le Nouveau Robinson” and “Yama no Shashin”. She is professor of photography at Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and teaches Photography: Theories and Techniques at the IULM University in Milan.