A site-specific installation forming part of the “Bruce Gilden” project, presented for the first time in Italy in Brescia, which pays tribute to the career of one of the pioneers of Street Photography.
From March 27 to Aug. 23, Brescia becomes the first Italian city to host an exhibition project dedicated to Bruce Gilden (New York, 1946), a full member of the Magnum Photos agency and known as one of the pioneers of Street Photography, with a single project consisting of an exhibition and a site-specific installation, set up at the Museo di Santa Giulia and Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, for the first time in Italy.
The initiative, curated by Denis Curti developed in direct collaboration with the artist, organized by the Brescia Musei Foundation in collaboration with Magnum Photos, is an international project and one of the most significant events of the 9th edition of the Brescia Photo Festival (March 26-29, 2026) promoted by the Municipality of Brescia and the Brescia Musei Foundation, in collaboration with the Cavallerizza-center of Italian photography, and continues the line of investigation into contemporary U.S. photographers, which the Brescia institution began in 2023 with David La Chapelle and continued last year with Joel Meyerowitz.
The site-specific installation entitled “Grace / Grace. Bruce Gilden for Raphael,” created specifically for this first Italian presentation, features the photographic diptych commissioned by Fondazione Brescia Musei from the New York-based photographer to enrich the collection of the Brescia Civic Museums. The work reinterprets the concept of “grace,” exemplified by Raphael’s two works on loan to the exhibition Raphael: Sublime Poetry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from March 29, and is on display from March 27 to July 12 at the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo.
A cultural operation with which Fondazione Brescia Musei and the Municipality of Brescia won the Photography Strategy 2025 call for proposals, issued by the Ministry of Culture’s General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity for the selection of proposals for the acquisition, commissioning and promotion of photography. The intent was to affirm photography as the main artistic medium of contemporaneity, capable of confronting the great themes of the art of the past, through the direct involvement of one of its most influential protagonists.
