Photography into Sculpture, Casa Regis Mosso Italy 2025
October 19, 2025 – February 22, 2026
by appointment
Casa Regis – Center for Culture and Contemporary Art proudly hosts the exhibition, “Photography into Sculpture: an homage and an update”, featuring 11 international artists. It is both a direct homage to the historic 1970 exhibition at MOMA and a look at where photography as sculpture stands today.
Peter C. Bunnell curated a ground breaking exhibition entitled “Photography into Sculpture” for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970, receiving luke warm if not hostile reviews. By the 1980s, Bunnell himself was convinced the experiment of photography as sculpture – that is, photographically formed images used in a sculptural or fully dimensional manner – hadn’t really continued to develop. Maybe with a slower take off speed than what he expected, the current art movement indicates the opposite. Besides the fact that the original exhibition has been restaged multiple times with rave reviews, Mary Statzer in 2016 published interviews with the participants of the original exhibition along with other current experts in the field, bringing the discussion up to date (“The Photographic Object 1970”, University of California Press). It is in this publication where renown Los Angeles curator Rebecca Morse, in her chapter on “The evolving photographic object”, accurately states “What becomes evident is that contemporary artists have abandoned medium specificity for hybridity in ever-increasing numbers”. Well known artists such as Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager come to mind as the most iconic.
This continued intrigue since the 2000s in the historical MOMA show is in direct proportion to the fascination of the subject today. Casa Regis with this current exhibition offers artists, arriving from various European countries, the US, and of course Italy, a place where it is possible to continue the exploration of experimental terrain and while each artist has very individual content, the common uniting factor lies in the very specific research of materials and/or display methods.
Bennie Flores Ansell is a different kind of installation artist altogether, in the sense that she arrives at photography indirectly through auxiliary or behind-the-scene artifacts, such as positive film transparencies, variable contrast filters, 35mm orthographic film reels, and dichroic films. Her sculptures and light projections playfully repurpose these historic analogical finds as they reference the act of making a photograph.
The diversity in style and theme is evident, as each artist pursues a very personalized approach to the role of photography in a multi-media or sculptural setting. What is undeniable is that the incorporation of the photographic medium to express contemporary themes will only continue to grow and will undoubtedly stay in stride with trade products and technological developments.
L. Mikelle Standbridge
