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Art Institute of Chicago

Piazza Pugliesi, from the series "Italian Night Color Work"

Lewis Baltz

1991, printed 2006

Attribution
Lewis Baltz American, 1945-2014
Medium
Silver dye-bleach print
Physical dimensions
243.9 × 127 cm (96 × 50 in.)
Credit line
Gift of Michael Rubel
CATALOGUE RECORD

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Source rights statement: Public-domain image eligibility not established by this export

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From the museum

The European architectural views by Lewis Baltz, made around 1990, differ strikingly from the bleak landscapes that cemented his reputation in the mid-1970s, when he emerged as part of the New Topographics movement. These more recent works introduce an off-center vantage point, color, great size, and an emphatic sense of time’s passage, evident in the form of blurred taillights and other atmospheric inclusions. Motivating these changes was Baltz’s growing interest in public space as regulated by private development and governmental control: for example, the proliferation of outdoor surveillance cameras (the elevated view here mimics that seen through such devices). Piazza Pugliesi—a place that does not exist under that name but could be located in Puglia or somewhere else in Southern Italy—offers a model view of a denatured terrain.

Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0

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