If the art of photography is your passion, you won’t want to miss the two new exhibitions which, in April, inaugurate the 2025 exhibition calendar of Le Stanze della Fotografia on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. And don’t forget the competition for young talents of the lens aged 18 to 30

2025 is getting off to an auspicious start for Le Stanze della Fotografia, the joint initiative of Marsilio Arte and Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Starting on 10 April the exhibition spaces on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore will host the photographs of two stars of the contemporary photography scene: Robert Mapplethorpe and Maurizio Galimberti.
Curated by Denis Curti, artistic director of Le Stanze della Fotografia, the retrospective dedicated to Mapplethorpe will be the first act of a trilogy that will conclude in 2026 at the Palazzo Reale in Milan and the Museo dell’Ara Pacis in Rome. While classical forms inspire the Venetian event, desire and beauty will be analysed respectively during the Milanese and Capitoline exhibitions, offering the public a wide-ranging perspective on the production of the photographer who died in 1989.
Promoted by Marsilio Arte and Fondazione Giorgio Cini in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation of New York, the exhibition coming to the lagoon will bring together over two hundred images, some of which are being shown in Italy for the first time, marking Mapplethorpe’s return to Venice thirty-three years after the monographic exhibition curated at Palazzo Fortuny by Germano Celant.
This time the focus is on the classical dimension that shines through the artist’s shots, capable of capturing the statuesque and at the same time sensual aspect of male and female bodies and also of the plant world. As the curator explains, “Mapplethorpe uses photography to reinterpret and update classical aesthetics, accentuating the dialogue between the living body and idealized sculpture” and the works exhibited at Le Stanze della Fotografia confirm this. They range from the very first collages, created in the late 1960s by combining and superimposing original drawings and clippings from homoerotic magazines and found objects, to male and female nudes, where symmetry and compositional rigor complement the exploration of desire and eroticism, in the pursuit of an artistic philosophy that embraced all these areas. There is no shortage of portraits – of his friend and muse Patti Smith, bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, but also of Truman Capote, Glenn Close, Richard Gere, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Annie Leibovitz, Yoko Ono, Susan Sontag and Andy Warhol, just to name a few – nor self-portraits, emblems of an exploration of identity that doesn’t shy away from complexity.
The exhibition dedicated to Mapplethorpe also provides the opportunity to launch the second edition of the open call aimed at young amateur and professional photographers aged 18 to 30, invited to submit to the jury (composed of gallery owner Pierpaolo Falone, curator Denis Curti, gallery owner Gió Marconi, general director of the Mapplethorpe Foundation Joree Adilman and artistic director of the MIA Photo Fair Francesca Malgara), by 2 March 2025, three shots that evoke the themes of the exhibition trilogy. The nine selected works – three for each author – will be exhibited for the entire duration of the Venetian exhibition, while the finalist works will be on display at Le Stanze della Fotografia stand at MIA Photo Fair in Milan, from 20 to 23 March 2025. The three winners will be announced during the press conference presenting the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at Le Stanze della Fotografia, on 9 April.
And finally, the first floor of Le Stanze della Fotografia will host the works of Maurizio Galimberti, famous throughout the world thanks to his portraits of icons such as Lady Gaga, Robert De Niro, Johnny Depp and Umberto Eco and publications and exhibitions in New York, Paris, Milan, Rome and Venice. As part of the Venetian solo exhibition Maurizio Galimberti tra Polaroid/Ready Made e le lezioni americane di Italo Calvino curated by Denis Curti, the photographer exhibits his famous Polaroid mosaics featuring Johnny Depp, Barbara Bouchet and Angelica Huston along a path divided into six sections ‒ Cenacolo, Storia, Sport, Ritratti, Taylor Swift and Luoghi. Using as references the photographic collages of David Hockney, the futurist works of Umberto Boccioni and Nudo che scende le scale n. 2 by Marcel Duchamp, Galimberti breaks down reality into multiple visual fragments that he then stitches back together into compositions from which a profound reflection on perceptive logic emerges. The images bear on their “skin” the signs of manipulation carried out by the photographer during the development phase, applying pressure with pens and wooden sticks, or they become the pieces of a mosaic that offers an extraordinary overall vision. After all, as the curator emphasises, Galimberti’s works “do not aim to faithfully reproduce reality, but are the result of an investigation of the visible, an effort to deconstruct the world that finds in photography the ideal tool”.

Text by Arianna Testino

INFO
Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico
from 10 April to 23 November 2025
Maurizio Galimberti tra Polaroid/Ready Made e le lezioni americane di Italo Calvino
from 10 April to 27 July 2025
LE STANZE DELLA FOTOGRAFIA
Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
https://www.lestanzedellafotografia.it

https://lestanzedellafotografia.it/it/attivita/open-call

Cover photo: Self Portrait, 1975 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission