The exhibition Ugo Mulas / Saul Steinberg's Graffiti in Milan, curated by the Ugo Mulas Archive and Walter Guadagnini, will be in CAMERA's Project Room from 14 February to 14 April 2024 and recounts that event, re-proposing the entire decoration to scale from Mulas' photographs. A selection of about fifteen photographs - some vintage, others printed for this occasion - allow us to enter deeply into the work of these two great representatives of 20th century art, to appreciate Steinberg's iconographic fantasy and the poetic lucidity of Mulas' eye.
In 1961, Saul Steinberg produced an extraordinary graffito decoration of the atrium of the Palazzina Mayer in Milan, commissioned by Studio BBPR, which was overseeing its renovation. An important work, which followed other similar undertakings by the great designer and illustrator in the United States during the previous decade.
When the work was complete, Steinberg asked a young Ugo Mulas to witness the work, both in its entirety and in detail. To help the photographer in his work, the artist also wrote a short text explaining the iconography and meaning of his work, a reflection on the labyrinth starting with the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan, the city where Steinberg had lived before the war. In 1997, the building was renovated again, and the graffiti destroyed: today, only Ugo Mulas' photographs remain of that splendid intervention, capable of restoring both the document of the work and its interpretation.
