Both were born and raised in the same landscapes, just over a hundred kilometres apart, yet separated by thirty years. Despite this, they shared a similar vision in much of their work. The exhibition The Analogous Mountain explores these parallels between the filmmaker Antonioni and the photographer Ghirri. It runs from 15 November to 15 February at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge.

Curated by art critic and independent curator Frederic Montornés, the show presents an unfinished visual essay focusing on analogies, approaches, and shared ways of seeing. Both artists were inspired by the low mountains of Emilia-Romagna, shaping their conceptual and formal horizons.

The exhibition brings together around forty images from Antonioni’s Enchanted Mountains series, but also early photographs that Ghirri captured in the Po Valley in the 1970s. In both cases, these are images that invite contemplation and slow, reflective reading (pictured: Bastia, Luigi Ghirri; 1976; Courtesy of the heirs of Luigi Ghirri).

These works correspond to the moment when Antonioni was still working on the Enchanted Mountains series and when Ghirri was beginning to see that technological acceleration was turning images into consumer products, and he proposed his photographs as an alternative.

Both came from different family backgrounds and were born thirty-one years apart, but both began to establish the foundations of their ways of seeing based on what was closest to them. As the curator himself explains, they started “from the vital exploration of an intimate, nearby, and familiar space in order to determine, from this knowledge, the basic lines of action they were going to undertake outside of any orthodoxy.”

The title of Antonioni’s series, Enchanted Mountains, comes from a 1950s novel by the French writer René Daumal, which narrates an expedition in search of a mysterious and inaccessible mountain, made of a material with the property of bending the space around it. It exists in an unmanifested space, and its location requires two people. In this case, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luigi Ghirri, in this exhibition, show us, in a play of analogies, the mountains they imagined.

If you want to see the exhibition The Analogous Mountain and enjoy the shared landscapes of Michelangelo Antonioni and Luigi Ghirri, visit La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, but first check the website for information about the show.