At the Villa dei Capolavori the largest Italian retrospective of the Dadaist artist: over 250 masterpieces including iconic shots, paintings and ready-mades
I paint what cannot be photographed, what comes from imagination, dreams or an unconscious drive. I photograph the things I don’t want to paint, the things that already have an existence. This is how Man Ray, one of the main Dadaist artists, described his vision of art, where the boundaries between disciplines dissolve to leave room for total creativity. Painter, photographer, director and graphic designer, Man Ray is among the most flexible personalities in the art world. Born in Philadelphia in 1890, he lived between New York and Paris, establishing the language of Dadaism and embracing the demands of Surrealism. Fifty years after his death, the Villa dei Capolavori, headquarters of the Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Mamiano di Traversetolo in Parma, inaugurates the exhibition Man Ray: Everythingthe most complete retrospective ever dedicated to creativity in Italy with over 250 works including photographs, paintings, objects, sculptures, graphics, books and films. An exhibition journey that starts from the United States to arrive in Europe, in Paris, where Marcel Duchamps himself welcomes him and acts as his mentor. And if the American years marked the discovery of photography, it was in France that Man Ray joined the avant-garde and experimented with techniques such as rayographs and solarizations and composed the Électricité portfolio of 1931, a portfolio of ten photogravures created with the collaboration of Lee Miller, the American photographer who was first his assistant and later became his muse and companion. Women have a crucial role in the artist’s life starting from Nusch Éluard and Kiki de Montparnasse, her portrait Le Violon d’Ingres (1924) is on display, alongside masterpieces such as Tears, Prayer, Anatomy, Noire et Blanche. Shots and paintings like the lips of À l’Heure de l’Observatoire, les Amoureux they are the basis of an aesthetic that is formalized in the objects, the cadeau and in design projects such as Palettable, a palette-shaped table, conceived in the 1940s and then published in 1971. Created with the curatorship of Walter Guadagnini, Mauro Carrera, Stefano Roffi, Man Ray: everything is scheduled from 12 September to 13 December 2026.
