Galleria Michela Rizzo is pleased to present Shanghai, the exhibition marking the return of the great photographer Gabriele Basilico to the lagoon city, in collaboration with the Gabriele Basilico Archive.

The exhibition is the outcome of a photographic project launched in 2010 on the occasion of the Shanghai World Expo, during which Basilico was invited to document the Italian Pavilion. The exhibition in the gallery does not represent a simple return to those images, but takes the form of a necessary step, capable of restoring an autonomous and reflective dimension to the artist's research, beyond the commission and context of origin.

Through the encounter between analytical gaze and poetic sensitivity, Basilico's work thus becomes a critical lens, where urban space is revealed in its becoming: an open-air laboratory, a crossroads where architecture and identity confront each other in the tension between past and future.

Shanghai, a city divided by the Huangpu River, offers itself to the artist's lens as a double landscape: on the one hand the historical memory of the Puxi districts, on the other the dizzying rise of Pudong, with its ever-expanding skyscrapers. This contrast becomes a visual and conceptual matter for Basilico, a reflection of a precarious balance between permanence and change. His images - precise, rigorous, often taken from above - capture the complexity of an urban fabric in transformation, where the texture of the old shikumen dissolves under the pressure of a modernity that knows no respite. In the nocturnal views, the city lights up with iridescent lights: a living body that breathes day and night, suspended between reality and representation.