Spencer Tunick Rome 1 (Piazza Navona)

cm 97 x 76

The American artist Spencer Tunick is renowned for photographing nudes in unusual urban contexts and natural settings, like city streets and public squares, snowy mountains and vast deserts. After completing his university degree in 1988, Tunick began photographing nudes, either single subjects or medium-sized groups, eventually coming to the point of orchestrating multitudes, always completely unclothed. He has run into trouble with the law in the middle of his performances on many occasions, even ending up in jail. However, Tunick uses the nude without any erotic or sexual intent, privileging the physical characteristics of shape and color in a democratizing way that makes all bodies equal at the expressive level. In Tunick’s work, the nude is a creative means: like a brush for a painter, the artist uses the human body to create new art forms in dialogue with nature or art, as in "Rome 1 (Piazza Navona)", where the bodies lie on the ground in front of Bernini’s Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi. This work was created for “Le Tribù dell’arte”. For his performance, and the resulting photograph, Tunick was interested in working with a famous, complex sculpture in one of the city’s most symbolic piazzas. At dawn on April 28 2001, one hundred and twenty five people gathered at the Baroque fountain and, entirely nude, arranged themselves on the ground in random order, according to the artist’s directions. In the composition of the photographic image, the random arrangement of the models is devoid of artistic inclination and powerfully reveals the contrast between the marble statues and the live bodies, staging a conflict between culture and nature.

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A. Bonito Oliva (ed.), Le Tribù dell’arte, exhibition catalogue (Rome, Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea), Milan 2001. www.spencertunick.com.

Foto Roberto Galasso

Donation by Claudia Gian Ferrari

Photography