upcoming: The Biennale and the Image

UGO MULAS
THE BIENNALE AND THE IMAGE
From 14th May 2026 - 23rd July 2026

Parra & Romero presents Ugo Mulas: The Biennale and the Image, an exhibition dedicated to the extraordinary body of work Ugo Mulas developed around the Venice Biennale, one of the key stages in the shaping of modern and contemporary international art.

Conceived at a particularly meaningful moment, coinciding with the opening of this year's Biennale, the exhibition reflects on the Biennale not only as a major artistic event, but also as a space of representation, construction, and memory. Through Ugo Mulas' precise, intelligent, and deeply sensitive gaze, the Biennale emerges not merely as a site where art is displayed, but as a complex dispositif in which images, relationships, gestures, presences, and imaginaries are produced, elements that have contributed to defining the visual history of the twentieth century.

The project brings together a selection of approximately forty photographs, including vintage prints, a number of colour images, and a limited presence of modern prints, forming a display that deliberately avoids rigid hierarchies or a strictly chronological sequence. The exhibition has been conceived to allow for a more open, intuitive, and sensitive experience of discovery, in which the viewer can move freely across different temporalities, atmospheres, and registers of looking.

While the core of the selection focuses on the interior of the Biennale, its pavilions, artworks, installations, and artists, the exhibition also includes those images in which Mulas' attention shifts towards the margins of the event: meetings in cafés, journeys, pauses, moments of waiting, or seemingly peripheral scenes which, far from being anecdotal, broaden our understanding of the Biennale as a lived experience, a human ecosystem, and an expanded theatre of art. It is in this territory that figures, gestures, and situations appear that condense, with extraordinary naturalness, the cultural, social, and symbolic density of that moment.

Beyond their documentary value, Ugo Mulas' photographs reveal a singular capacity to transform observation into visual thought. His work does not simply record a scene: it interprets it, orders it, and gives it form. In this sense, The Biennale and the Image is not only an exhibition about the Venice Biennale, but also a reflection on how it becomes image, and on how, through that image, a certain idea of art, the artist, and exhibition history itself is constructed.

The installation has been conceived with a rigorous and understated approach, yet also with a strong aesthetic dimension. The display introduces a chromatic presence deeply connected to the Venetian tradition through vertical bands in Venetian red, a colour charged with historical and symbolic resonance that lends the exhibition a refined, quiet, and evocative atmosphere. Far from functioning as a scenographic gesture, this element accompanies the exhibition as a layer of meaning, linking the images to the pictorial and cultural memory of Venice.

With this project, Parra & Romero reaffirms its commitment to exhibitions that, beyond the presentation of works, activate historical contexts, demanding curatorial readings, and long-term institutional conversations. Ugo Mulas: The Biennale and the Image is thus conceived as a museum-scale exhibition that restores contemporaneity to a gaze that remains fundamental to understanding not only the Venice Biennale, but also the way twentieth-century art learned to see itself, to represent itself, and to inscribe itself into history.

UGO MULAS
1928, Pozzolengo, Italy - 1973, Milan, Italy.

Ugo Mulas was one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century photography and as a perceptive witness to the evolution of contemporary art in Europe and the United States. He was the first to develop a critical reading of the artist and the artistic system through photography and in doing so he underlined the importance of photography as the language of art at a time, in the late 1960s, when conceptual art was entering the scene.

Ugo Mulasˇ photographs have been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, such as Kunsthalle Basel (1971, 1974), Palazzo della Pilotta, Parma (1973), Documenta VI in Kassel (1977), Accademia americana in Rome (1982), Musée Rath in Geneva (1984), Kunsthaus Zürich (1985), Villa Malpensata (MUSEC) in Lugano (1986), Palazzo Braschi (Museo di Roma) (1992), Guggenheim in New York (1994), Fondazione Prada in Milan (1995), Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid (1996), Centro Artistico Alik Cavaliere in Milan (2000), Philadelphia Museum of Art (2002), MAXXI in Rome (2007-08), Museo del Novecento in Milan (2011), Centre Pompidou in Paris (2015), the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris (2016), Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Copenhagen (2021), Fondazione Pino Pascali in Polignano a Mare (2022), Le Stanze della Fotografia in Venice (2023), Palazzo Reale in Milan (2024), among many others.