IMAGES FOR SOUNDS: Artist Covers for Music Records is the first exhibition at Villa Lontana to explore the medium of the music record, and above all of the album cover, as a potential artistic space open to the development of a visual language. The show unites more than 140 albums released since the 1950s together with artists’ covers conceived for the express purpose of giving images to sounds. The exhibition reflects on the collaboration between visual artists and musicians, playing on the duality between visual and sound material. In doing so, it focuses not on records made by artists but on artists’ covers for a variety of musical projects, which range from the odd casual collaboration to broad solutions for entire discographic series.The main part of the exhibition draws from the extensive record collection of the musicologist, art historian and collector Giuseppe Garrera, featuring more than 100 records and artists’ covers. This section of the exhibition traces a history of artists’ covers within Italian music publishing from the 50s to the 90s, attempting to provide an initial survey of the subject in the absence of any major discographic collections or bibliographic studies, and emphasizing the visual-musical relation or experience of the album object. The idea of “collection” remains central to the curatorial development of Villa Lontana, as it hosts within it, and for the first time, another collection, and thus another archive of images and sounds— which allow for a new reading of an issue that has been examined in the past, albeit in a different key.Two themed sections will be presented throughout the course of the exhibition. The first is an homage to the late Sylvano Bussotti, featuring a selection of his most radical and brilliant covers for his own sheet music. These too derive from Giuseppe Garrera’s collection, with many of them exhibited in public for the first time. The other section is dedicated to more international and often more contemporary collaborations. This latter section will be in continuous evolution for the duration of the exhibition, with a regular rotation of different records borrowed from the collections and archives of the artists themselves or from the records’ respective labels. The musical contents of the exhibited records will provide the soundtrack to the exhibition— it too in continuous evolution and chosen by the viewers, who will be able, upon request, to listen to the music and so explore in space the visual translation of sounds into images, moving from the great masterpieces of classical music, to folk songs, to the experimental sounds of electronic music and techno tracks.Download Press Release.
All of Irma Blank, Sylvano Bussott, Francesco Clemente, Luigi Ghirri, Keith Haring, Sol LeWitt, Bruno Munari, Magdalo Mussio, Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Cloti Ricciardi, Mario Schifano, Edith Schloss, Cy Twombly and Luigi Veronesi’s works are courtesy Giuseppe Garrera.Ph: Simon d’Exéa
